Cloudflare is the One Tech Company Still Sticking By Neo-Nazi Websites (qz.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: One company is sticking by The Daily Stormer and other far-right websites: the cloud security and performance service Cloudflare. Cloudflare acts as a shield between websites and the outside world, protecting them from hackers and preserving the anonymity of the sites' owners. But Cloudflare is not a hosting service: It does not store website content on its servers. And that fact, as far as the company is concerned, exempts it from judgment over who its clients are -- even if those clients are literally Nazis. In a statement Cloudflare sent to Quartz and other publications yesterday, the company refused to explicitly say it will continue to do business with sites like The Daily Stormer, but pointed out that the content would exist regardless of what Cloudflare does or doesn't do. "Cloudflare is aware of the concerns that have been raised over some sites that have used our network. We find the content on some of these sites repugnant. While our policy is to not comment on any user specifically, we are cooperating with law enforcement in any investigation. Cloudflare is not the host of any website. Cloudflare is a network that provides performance and security services to more than 10% of all Internet requests. Cloudflare terminating any user would not remove their content from the Internet, it would simply make a site slower and more vulnerable to attack."
UPDATE: The Daily Stormer now says Cloudflare has decided to drop their site after all.

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[Anonymous Coward]

When does facebook shutter their marketing and profiting from everyone's privacy? And shut down all the antifa or is that gonna get me in trouble here?

Re:Cool that someone still stands for freedom

[sarbonn]

Back when I was a web designer in the infancy of the Internet, I ended up dealing with this a lot. I built and maintained web sites for a bunch of different, diverse companies and one of them was an adult bookstore. The woman that owned that store was a very nice person who sold her smutty books in peace and in person was the complete opposite of the content of any of those books. But after a few years of being hosted by a net provider, a new person was promoted to a higher position at that company, and he went nuts. He was extremely religious and couldn't believe that this "scumbag" was providing "evil" to the masses. Without warning, he completely shut down that site and deleted EVERYTHING off of its servers. He then went after the shopping cart provider for the site and threatened to pull everyone of their clients off his site as well, if they didn't stop servicing the bookstore (even though he now had no connection to it any more). I ended up having to build a shopping cart for her with PHP (learning it over the weekend so I could figure out how to program it), and then I found her a more "adult-friendly" host. But I learned real quick like that people can be really cruel to you for almost no reason whatsoever, even if you've been that person's customer for years in a good, friendly relationship.

Re:Cool that someone still stands for freedom

[jwhyche]

This is true but I wonder how long it will be or even if it should remain that way. Google, Facebook, and Twitter control so much content and how we find it on the internet. All the companies mentioned have all ready shown a willingness to censor speech that doesn't match their agenda or corporate policies. How much longer before google polices decide what we can and can't see? How much longer before companies like Facebook and Twitter decide an election?

It might be time to start thinking about extending freedom of speech into certain private spheres.