Cloudflare Stops Supporting Neo-Nazi Site The Daily Stormer (arstechnica.com)

Timothy B. Lee reports via Ars Technica: All week, the infamous hate site Daily Stormer has been battling to stay online in the face of a concerted social media campaign to shut it down. The site lost its "dailystormer.com" domain on Monday after first GoDaddy and then Google Domains blacklisted it from their domain registration services. The site re-appeared online on Wednesday morning at a new domain name, dailystormer.ru. But within hours, the site had gone offline again after it was dropped by Cloudflare, an intermediary that defends customers against denial-of-service attacks. Daily Stormer's Andrew Anglin reported Cloudflare's decision to drop the site in a post on the social media site Gab. His post was first spotted by journalist Matthew Sheffield.

Comments

Huh?

[mhkohne]

Has Cloudflare released a statement on this? Because...this is at odds with their previous behavior, and I want to know if it's just a one-off 'if you beat us hard enough, we'll do things' or if they've actually changed their mind. Because I'd kind of like them to stop helping DDOS providers.

Re:Huh?

[Motherfucking Shit]

They put up a blog post explaining their decision a little while ago.

I take some umbrage at Cloudflare's rationale. Their position regarding this site, as well as various other sites, seems to be "we're just a proxy." The issue with that defense is that by proxying for a site, the Cloudflare service hides and obfuscates whatever provider is actually hosting the content. This is a) by design, and b) necessary in order to make the DDoS protection effective. That doesn't make it any less problematic.

Cloudflare wants to pass the buck somewhere else in the "infrastructure stack," as they call it, and I don't necessarily disagree that what amounts to a glorified transit provider is the wrong place to be implementing blocks. But given the very nature of Cloudflare's service, how does one figure out where else to complain? When a site is using Cloudflare, all roads dead end in Cloudflare's network. The site's name servers are in the cloudflare.com domain. The site's A records are inside Cloudflare IP space. Cloudflare is the primary visible service provider in these scenarios, whether they host any content or not.

Case in point, I've watched this story play out with some interest over the past couple of days. I still have no idea where Daily Stormer's content was actually being hosted. It almost certainly would have violated the AUP/TOS of that hosting provider, and they probably would have terminated the site directly. But with Cloudflare in the way, no one knows who to complain to.

When your business model is being a black-box opaque front for all comers, don't be surprised when the world directs its anger at you.

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[Anonymous Coward]

Someones never been on the daily stormer, or browsed comments on far-right websites. Did you know that an internet archive exists?

Re:Meanwhile the extreme left is unscathed

[Quirkz]

Except the only thing that these people are actually doing is saying shit you don't like.

Are you sure it's the *only* thing? A gal I know got spit on by a stranger in a coffee shop in Denver today, because she was Jewish. Now maybe *that* guy isn't like these other guys with the same ideology, and as long as they're only talking about things, and it's just this guy who's working his way up through assault, there's a line there. But it's hard to believe anyone who self-identifies as a Nazi isn't hoping to have a chance to do at least that much.

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[PopeRatzo]

Really, isn't the best way to fight such complete stupidity to keep it in the open?

Do you have an historical example of this working? I mean, there may well be some, but none come to mind.

If you shine a light on some bugs and they scurry under a rock, you can then blow up the rock and problem solved. You don't beat the bugs by inviting them into your house.

Nazis are cockroaches. When you promote genocide by idolizing genocide that already happened you forfeit your right to be part of civil society.

Re:So much for common carrier status

[mhkohne]

Actually, and especially with CloudFlare, I don't think anyone has much of a leg to stand on to take them on. First amendment is a thing that limits the government, not business - they are free to do business (or not) with whoever they choose.

Whether it's a good idea or not, is a separate thing.

Re:While these guys are nutters..

[duke_cheetah2003]

Businesses have no responsibility to provide services to such a group and it isn't oppression or censorship to refuse them service, in fact it would be oppression and censorship to force them to support them.

This is exactly right. However, infrastructure business have a responsibility to uphold free speech. They have shown extremely poor judgement by caving to pressure to suppress. Sorry, that is not going to work. And in fact, if history is a lesson, trying to stamp this out in this fashion is insane. These kinds of groups just become more hateful, radical, violent and provocative. If they can't speak, then they will act.

Let them have their wretched little website to spew hatred at each other. At least then we know who and where they are. Society is playing with fire here, repeating past mistakes.

Let me make a sort of messy analogy. Just pretend for a minute highways and streets were privately owned. This would be the equivalent of saying these people can't drive on your streets, period. And not only that, they're not even allowed to have an address on a street. Does that really sound like something we want to say we did to someone else? And pretend it's somehow a "good thing"? Really?

Re:Nazi

[Pfhorrest]

So those college kids proudly waving around the flag of the people who tortured you, chanting the slogans of the people who tortured you, and espousing the ideology of the people who tortured you, doesn't bother you? They're not "real Nazis" despite adopting all the symbols of the real Nazis and standing for what real Nazis stood for? Why, because this generation of them haven't tortured you yet?