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Cloudflare: FOSTA Was a 'Very Bad Bill' That's Left the Internet's Infrastructure Hanging (vice.com)
Last week, President Donald Trump signed the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) into law. It's a bill that penalizes any platform found "facilitating prostitution," and has caused many advocacy groups to come out against the bill, saying that it undermines essential internet freedoms. The most recent entity to decry FOSTA is Cloudflare, which recently decided to terminate its content delivery network services for an alternative, decentralized social media platform called Switter. Motherboard talked to Cloudflare's general counsel, Doug Kramer, about the bill and he said that FOSTA was an ill-consider bill that's now become a dangerous law: "[Terminating service to Switter] is related to our attempts to understand FOSTA, which is a very bad law and a very dangerous precedent," he told me in a phone conversation. "We have been traditionally very open about what we do and our roles as an internet infrastructure company, and the steps we take to both comply with the law and our legal obligations -- but also provide security and protection, let the internet flourish and support our goals of building a better internet." Cloudflare lobbied against FOSTA, Kramer said, urging lawmakers to be more specific about how infrastructure companies like internet service providers, registrars and hosting and security companies like Cloudflare would be impacted. Now, he said, they're trying to figure out how customers like Switter will be affected, and how Cloudflare will be held accountable for them.
"We don't deny at all that we have an obligation to comply with the law," he said. "We tried in this circumstance to get a law that would make sense for infrastructure companies... Congress didn't do the hard work of understanding how the internet works and how this law should be crafted to pursue its goals without unintended consequences. We talked to them about this. A lot of groups did. And it was hard work that they decided not do." He said the company hopes, going forward, that there will be more clarity from lawmakers on how FOSTA is applied to internet infrastructure. But until then, he and others there are having to figure it out along with law enforcement and customers. "Listen, we've been saying this all along and I think people are saying now, this is a very bad law," Kramer said. "We think, for now, it makes the internet a different place and a little less free today as a result. And there's a real-world implication of this that people are just starting to grapple with."
"We don't deny at all that we have an obligation to comply with the law," he said. "We tried in this circumstance to get a law that would make sense for infrastructure companies... Congress didn't do the hard work of understanding how the internet works and how this law should be crafted to pursue its goals without unintended consequences. We talked to them about this. A lot of groups did. And it was hard work that they decided not do." He said the company hopes, going forward, that there will be more clarity from lawmakers on how FOSTA is applied to internet infrastructure. But until then, he and others there are having to figure it out along with law enforcement and customers. "Listen, we've been saying this all along and I think people are saying now, this is a very bad law," Kramer said. "We think, for now, it makes the internet a different place and a little less free today as a result. And there's a real-world implication of this that people are just starting to grapple with."
When the majority of Democrats in the House and Senate voted for this?
Okay, maybe it is indeed the selling of ass, but not far behind is the often uncompensated occupation of righteous indignation... undoubtedly founded by a special interest group previously in charge of a monopoly on the delivery of ass... not entirely an objective political action committee.
Clearly legalized prostitution is a deterrent to sexual assault. If I hear one more person claim rape isn't a sex crime, I think I might run outside with my hands over my ears and complete those fucking chores I've been putting off... or have another whiskey. I can't be certain.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Dear Internet services companies, here's the plan. You move offshore. We'll get VPNs. Citizen idiots will continue to vote in idiot politicians who will continue to make idiotic laws.
Heaven forbid two consenting adults do whatever the fuck they want, causing no injury to anyone, except for moral busybodies.
You are a nation that is fundamentally happy with the idea of people shooting children when they are at school, but the barest glimpse of a nipple and its national indignation. Very strange priorities ...
Imagine a law that says you cannot serve food in restaurants to anyone that either has a felony conviction or is a suspect in an ongoing case in any jurisdiction in the US.
Cloudflare's business should be providing internet infrastructure to paying (or nonpaying) customers. It should not be, at all, trying to decide whether or not a customer's data or business practices are unacceptable in various regions around the world, especially at a level where Cloudflare itself is supposedly criminal liable. Can you imagine needing to undergo a background check to service from an ISP? That's basically what this amounts to.
It's simply ridiculous.
By the same zany, nonsense logic, we should ban labouring jobs because some people are forced into slave labour.
Actually, it's more like selling someone a gun, then learning after the fact that they intend to use it to rob a bank, with the slight difference that, in this case, Cloudflare can take the gun back. In neither case, though, is there (nor should there be) any liability for the initial sale; except that FOSTA actually puts that liability on Cloudflare even though they have no way of knowing what someone will use their service for until after they've used it.
Now, if you want to say Cloudflare should be liable for illegal activities they're aware of, facilitated by their services, and don't take action to stop, we can probably agree on that. And, funny enough, that's exactly what the existing Safe Harbor laws already do.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Hell no. If you can’t tell them apart, all of them will have to be left alone, and you will have to find some other way to combat human trafficking. That is a core element of a free society under the rule of law.
In practice it’s more of a consideration than a hard principle, but it’s an important one. It means that with any law that harms innocents for the sake of fighting a certain crime, the rights of these innocents must weigh very, very heavily against the purported goals. And where the impact on innocent bystanders is large, it becomes important to ensure and verify that those goals are actually met. In that light, this law falls seriously short. It’s “think of the children” legislation.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
The myth of the free and open internet got the last nail in its coffin, in part because of Cloudflare deciding whose traffic they were and were not going to carry. It was fun while it lasted, but c'est la vie.
Yeah, there's no way traffickers could get fake ID numbers.
The answer to trafficking is to legalize all forms of prostitution. If there's plenty of consenting supply then there's less profit in supplying it illegally and less people will be trafficked.
The same goes for drugs: Making drugs illegal doesn't take any drugs off the streets, it just fills the pockets of the mafia.
No sig today...
The general sense I get from this is lawmakers either wanted to make a well-intentioned law but, didn't understand the internet well enough to write it, were informed it was bad as written and it would take far more research and work to design it to work as intended, and the lawmakers decided they didn't want to spend the time/work and passed "whatever" instead or anti-sin activists wanted to shut down smut sites on the internet and intentionally passed it under the guise of an anti-trafficking bill to slide it through. Both scenarios are believable so I'm not sure which is correct. It is possible that group 1 started the bill and group 2 hijacked it, too.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -