policing the Internet

[cellio]

Yesterday Cloudflare, a service that increases reliability (and speed?) of web sites, shut down the Daily Stormer web site. Daily Stormer, if you haven't heard, is the site for the a hate group with broad impact in the US, most recently in the violence and murder in Charlottsville.

Their CEO's blog post announcing the termination isn't just a "they're evil and they're gone" announcement like you sometimes see. It's a thoughtful post that explains the dilemmas faced by the organizations that, by and large, make the Internet work, and what dangers this decision opens up.

Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare.

Now, having made that decision, let me explain why it's so dangerous.

[...] Someone on our team asked after I announced we were going to terminate the Daily Stormer: "Is this the day the Internet dies?" He was half joking, but only half. He's no fan of the Daily Stormer or sites like it. But he does realize the risks of a company like Cloudflare getting into content policing.

I also found this tidbit interesting:

In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: "Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet."

After finding that post I found this post on Gizmodo that, among things, quotes from internal email he sent.

This was my decision. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.

Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company. [...] No one should have that power.

I don't have a coherent opinion yet. On the one hand, policing content is a dangerous game and why I support net neutrality. On the other hand, private companies (and individuals) should be free to act (legally) in their own interests; companies have been refusing service to unacceptable customers on a case-by-case basis for years. On the third hand, there are differences between competitive markets and monopoly markets. (Within monopolies there are government-sponsored ones and we're-big-and-drove-everybody-out ones too.) Balancing all of that is hard.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I'm very disturbed by the wave of self-righteousness I've seen over the past week. People have attached names to people seen in Nazi regalia. They haven't always been the right names. It doesn't seem to matter much, as long as somebody gets hurt. Other people have been tearing down statues without waiting for a legal process. If it weren't summer, we'd doubtless be seeing student mobs shouting down and assaulting speakers who aren't in sufficient agreement with their views. It reminds me of September 12, 2001.

YouTube is taking down research on terrorism. The US is splitting into two camps, each of which wants to silence the other.

IThe Daily Stormer slandered Cloudflare (in the exact sense of malicious and false statements), and that seems like a good enough reason for termination. I'd say openly advocating Nazism is a good enough reason too. But the term "hate speech" has no defined meaning and can be used against anyone. Waking up in a bad mood isn't a sufficient criterion for anything more important than rejecting a cup of coffee. I'm expecting really bad things to come out of this trend.

[osewalrus]

Indeed. I am writing up my own blog post on the subject. It is a complicated question, made more complicated by the fact that people don't understand the law of common carriage and how it is different from either public utility law. I'm hoping to elucidate this.

The bottom line is that I believe that Internet access is a public utility, and therefore should not be terminated without suitable due process. In addition, to protect free speech, and to ensure fair access, one aspect of this is common carriage. Common carriage is not limited to public utilities, which means the common carriage requirement -- the requirement to serve all members of the public indifferently -- should extend to the necessary services to make speech on the Internet feasible, even if these businesses are not essential public utilities in the same way that basic access is a public utility.

[gingicat]

I see what you are saying, but they can easily go to another provider. How is this different from the owner of a storefront asking racists to take their business elsewhere?

Edit: this is a serious question to an expert.

[cellio]

I think this comment from osewalrus was meant as a reply to you.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, he has my sympathies -- it's a hard situation to be in. I'm painfully aware that one of the better metrics for "success" with Querki is when I have to start wrestling with things like this...

[minoanmiss]

*comments only to say I read this and am thinking about it*

[osewalrus]

First, it is not true that racists can go to another provider. In the case of broadband providers, there are relatively few. In the case of social media platforms, being excluded from FB means the inability to reach the 1.1 billion FB subcribers.

Flip it. If Planned Parenthood were designated an evil organization by the Republicans, so that the major companies that run nost of these companies decided to curry favor with the Rs and ban Planned Paenthood, how easy would it be for them to function?

[cellio]

Yes, the problem of what to do about de facto monopolies (and near-monopolies) as opposed to officially-government-sanctioned ones is tricky.

I'm looking forward to that blog post when you write it. (Or have you already? If so, where?)

[gingicat]

Ah - I thought you were talking about a reseller, not a backbone.

[osewalrus]

The same argument is made wrt access to Plan B or birth control and pharmacies. If you can get the script filled somewhere else, why does it matter? One part of the answer is that it is time sensitive and another is that even in a "competitive" markets, ou may have placves where it is not competitive.

And the thrid is that it is really not the business of the merchant to make those judgments.

[cellio]

Pharmacies came to mind for me, too. On the one hand there are lots of pharmacies. On the other hand it's easy to imagine every single pharmacy in Conservative-Churchville, USA refusing to fill prescriptions for Plan B, birth control, some psychological conditions, anything having to do with gender reassignment, and more. And further, pharmacy (like marriage-license administration) has had cases where people who know what they're getting into take a job, then refuse to do it, then mount a "freedom of (my, but not your) religion" argument for why they should be allowed to not do their jobs while retaining them, and because of the political climate in the US, they get away with it. One's personal religious observance ends at the boundaries with other people. Jews have been dealing with this for ages, sometimes losing (or not taking) jobs that preclude observance of Shabbat or other halacha, and that's just part of the cost of living in a world where we don't all have the same beliefs. You shouldn't get to be the dog in the manger.

Pharmacies are complicated because they're not a monopoly but they're government-regulated (a random person can't just hang out his shingle). I don't know for which parts of the Internet service industry that's true, but some for sure. So while I don't like government compelling private businesses in much of anything, if the government is acting as your enforcer then you're not completely private either, and it feels like that should make a difference even while teetering at the top of this slippery slope. These cases are different from, say, a bakery, which should be free to say "we won't write that on a cake" or even "we won't bake that cake" to anybody they choose -- and take the consequences if it's controversial.

[gingicat]

Apparently they violated the Terms of Service for DreamHost. https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/11967139.html?thread=114273443#cmt114273443

I should reread those, being as gingicat.org is hosted there, and make certain that I don't need to move again...