We have blocked Kiwifarms. Visitors to any of the Kiwifarms sites that use any of Cloudflare's services will see a Cloudflare block page and a link to this post.
That said, it does raise questions about who gets to decide (and on what grounds) who stays online. However, the actual problem with this is best exemplified by this little sentence from their previous blogpost (on how they are not going to block KW):
Today, more than 20 percent of the web relies directly on Cloudflare’s services.
That’s the underlying problem. If a website gets dropped by a provider that serves, say ~2% of the Internet, no biggie. If it gets dropped by 50 similar providers, well, clearly nobody wants to do business with you.
But if such decisions are made between a few huge providers, each handling a good 1/5th of global web traffic? Then yes, there is a bit of bad aftertaste. Which only allows the dweebs from KiwiFarms and such of this world to cry “censorship”.
it does raise questions about who gets to decide (and on what grounds) who stays online
There will always be some kind of authority. Even a human-less robot governed world will have robots. There is a reason why anarchism has never brought a successful revolution. There will be some basis of judgement probably forever.
Sure, I never said there isn’t, or that there should not be. I only said that this question is raised.
In an anarchist context this can be community consensus, I guess. In nation state context, this can be a government decision or a court order. And so on.
What I am trying to underscore here is that the fact that a company’s decision to not do business with a particularly toxic customer should not be of such immense consequence. And the only reason it is is because of CloudFlare’s position.
CloudFlare’s position is a bigger problem than CloudFlare’s policies.
Totally. Good riddance.
That said, it does raise questions about who gets to decide (and on what grounds) who stays online. However, the actual problem with this is best exemplified by this little sentence from their previous blogpost (on how they are not going to block KW):
That’s the underlying problem. If a website gets dropped by a provider that serves, say ~2% of the Internet, no biggie. If it gets dropped by 50 similar providers, well, clearly nobody wants to do business with you.
But if such decisions are made between a few huge providers, each handling a good 1/5th of global web traffic? Then yes, there is a bit of bad aftertaste. Which only allows the dweebs from KiwiFarms and such of this world to cry “censorship”.
There will always be some kind of authority. Even a human-less robot governed world will have robots. There is a reason why anarchism has never brought a successful revolution. There will be some basis of judgement probably forever.
Sure, I never said there isn’t, or that there should not be. I only said that this question is raised.
In an anarchist context this can be community consensus, I guess. In nation state context, this can be a government decision or a court order. And so on.
What I am trying to underscore here is that the fact that a company’s decision to not do business with a particularly toxic customer should not be of such immense consequence. And the only reason it is is because of CloudFlare’s position.
CloudFlare’s position is a bigger problem than CloudFlare’s policies.