What really happened: Cloudfare came under PR fire from the Washington Post, made a quick cost/benefit analysis and dropped 8Chan.
Similarly, if a person or organization in the United States is silenced because they were deplatformed by a corporate oligarchy, it's ridiculous to argue "the US doesn't have any law which prevents that, so Free Speech has not been violated".
Free Speech has absolutely been impinged by this decision.
Cloudflare isn't preventing anyone from saying anything. All that is happening is Cloudflare is using it's freedom of association not to associate with this website. This has nothing to do with 8Chan's ability to publish what they want - only their ability to use Cloudflare's services to do so. As the article mentions - because the US has the principle of Free Speech enshrined in law, 8chan has the ability to go and use other services, or to develop the services that Cloudflare provided. This will not impact 8chan's ability to publish whatever they like.
Now there is a theoretical point of view, that if a company has a monopoly - it is effectively able to police speech, but that's absolutely not the case here, as is demonstrated in the past by companies going elsewhere to exercise their right.
What is being proposed as an understanding of Free Speech is not allowing private individuals from refusing to service to you. This would seem to be mandating someone to act - which is a principle quite far away from any law I've heard of.
Now maybe we're not quite at that point yet (after all, the Daily Stormer did eventually find a CDN that would take them), but we may very well be getting close; there are only so many CDNs big enough to effectively shrug off large-scale DDOS attacks after all.
You also have to consider how difficult it is to match the quality of service provided by Cloudflare, and the hassle involved in switching to a new CDN. Cloudflare's refusal to service some organizations on the basis of ideology might have a chilling effect on Free Speech, even if it's not an insurmountable barrier.
I agree there is a balance between Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Association. The question is: where do we draw the line?
No, it hasn't. No one has a moral, legal, or ethical responsibility to pay for someone else's speech. The government must tread lightly, but private individuals are under no compulsion to listen to others. 8chan is NOT having their speech rights infringed, they are simply having a business agreement terminated. They are still 100% free to create a website somewhere else, write a book, or protest in the streets.
Do not confuse private property (Cloudflare's servers) with the public square.
For some of these entities, such as CDNs with enough infrastructure to stand up against large-scale DDOS attacks, there may only be a small number of viable options. What happens if all of those companies collectively decide to censor someone? You've effectively created a corporate oligarchy with the power to decide what sort of speech is and isn't allowed on the internet.
Now again, maybe we're not quite at that point yet (after all, the Daily Stormer did eventually find a CDN that would take them), but we may very well be getting close. You also have to consider that even without a true oligopoly; there's still a chilling effect created when a large percentage of the internet's major infrastructure providers collectively decide to censor certain speech on the basis of ideology.
At what point do you believe freedom of speech outweighs freedom of association? We've already decided freedom from racial discrimination trumps freedom of association, so it's not like this sort of thing would be entirely without precedent.
I also think there's a lot more nuance to this situation than you seem to be implying. I very much doubt there are a significant number of people ("right wingers" or otherwise) who believe property rights are the most important concern in all situations, nor are there many who believe in an absolute right to Free Speech at any cost. (The constitution itself allows for narrow exceptions for both of those rights.)
If it does something illegal, the law can close it down.
If it doesn't, it's should be absolutely no concern of Cloudlfare to police it.
That's more dystopian than a wacko shooter posting their message there. They could have posted it anywhere, or just posted it on their profile, send it to the news, etc.
Scam (lots of phishing and fake webshops), spam, piracy, illegal pornography, it's all chilling on CF's network en masse. When they get notified about this, do you think they terminate that client? No, they will just come up with some dogmatic story [1] and ignore every call to action/cooperation.
"we are rebuilding the Internet, and we don't believe that we or anyone else should have the right to tell people what content they can and cannot publish online."
Yes, ladies and gentleman, he said it. In 2012 Mr Prince was trying to build a proprietary internet. These days he would never say that again. I mean, it's just laughable that you feel zero responsibility over your clients. Hence they publicly deny this now of course.
CloudFlare: it would be great if you start actively participating in abuse prevention, instead of behaving like an offshore/bulletproof provider behind red 'n blue curtains.
CF forwards DMCA complaints to the website host so they can deal with the illegal content. CF already uses Safe browsing (or perhaps another system) to flag domains[0] that might be phishing/malware related. Illegal porn is something the sites themselves have to remove since (as said above) removing the site from CF only saves face for CF and doesn't change the content being on the service[1].
0: https://community.cloudflare.com/t/your-domain-has-been-susp...
1: to add, CF doesn't allow video files to be directly proxied on their network (when the main point of your site/service is serving these video files), you either need to use CF stream or have your video files on a separate non-proxied subdomain. If something illegal is stored on CF stream or Workers KV, they can take it down via the abuse form since they're the host of that content.
Don't host fascists. Don't do business with nazis.
