There are tons of shady websites hiding behind cloudflare's services. Some used .tk domains too but just in general, many shady websites are hiding behind Cloudflare and at least I know from personal experience if you contact cloud flare about it, they pretend not to be home.
"We do not host the website" was always there response, while that is perhaps technically true, arguing if they shut down the reverse proxying for that website it would be at least offline, never worked.
Cloudflare is a US company. If they provide hosting (or reverse proxying; I don't think there's a material legal difference) services for anything illegal under US law, shouldn't it be possible to compel them to stop doing that through the legal system?
And if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation.
> if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation.
Agreed. There's one other subset you didn't mention: "Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law". Cloudflare again has a pretty hardline stance that "the courts need to come to us and force us to take it down"
It's not reasonable. 99% of scams, frauds and harassment will never be subject of legal action, because there just aren't enough prosecutors out there to charge every fraud attempt.
If you require a court ruling before blocking a fraud, it means you will keep hosting 99% of frauds.
If it's clearly illegal, what prevents it from being handled in any court of law? If it's not actually as clear, preemptive/overzealous compliance can lead to all kinds of undesirable (in a liberal democracy) effects.
I also doubt that Cloudflare lets every single analogous issue bubble up to a full court case every single time, but for new/unclear/borderline scenarios, I'm glad that courts don't get to outsource their duty, i.e. determining the legality of actions, to a for-profit organization without public oversight.
Maybe that commentator lives in a country without common law, so precedent doesn't matter, but in a country like the US a law without precedent is considered "untried" and a lot of the details are worked out when the law is first enforced.
If the legislature doesn't like the court's interpretation, they can then amend the law and the process restarts.
So basically, at least in the US, nothing is clearly illegal until it is handled by a court -- so yes I think you're right
They can. You can also subpoena them for information on an account, there are literally lawyers with blogs talking about how to do this. The people complaining essentially think that they should have the right to take anything they want down with an abuse report.
A while back there was an interview with someone at Cloudflare and they were asked what about these Al Qaeda sites you guys are in front of, dude just answered "no comment". Seems that at the time they didn't ask many questions at all, like you said cause they don't want to go in to content moderation.
"We do not host the website" was always there response, while that is perhaps technically true, arguing if they shut down the reverse proxying for that website it would be at least offline, never worked.