Cloudflare serves up illegal content, let's say a phishing site.
Cloudflare refuses to stop serving the phishing site.
Cloudflare refuses to disclose who they are serving the site for.
By using your metaphor, the county would not even send out the sheriff to prevent a shipment from illegal material being driven over their highway once they were aware of it and would just flat out refuse to cooperate with state police.
It's not up to Cloudflare to decide what content is or isn't illegal. But Cloudflare actively prevents investigations to even start determining whether or not something is illegal.
You name cloudflare and a provider of the phishing site in a lawsuit. It makes it through courts. Cloudflare is unlikely to attempt to defend it. Your attorneys figure out how as a part of the redress get an order for cloudflare to disconnect the phishing site. You hire appropriate parties to service Cloudflare. Cloudflare disconnect the phishing site.
That's exactly how it is supposed to work.
Except CloudFlare refuses to name such an entity. All they're willing to do is forward my complaint to the "provider of the phishing site".
So they're willing to violate my privacy and put me in danger by possibly forwarding my details to possible criminals, but they refuse to do anything about the actual problem.
They say they will
> put a warning page up for when visitors try to access the specific link. We will also notify the site owner to have them clean the malicious files on their site. [0]
but that's a flat out lie. I've tried this avenue numerous times.
I shouldn't have to go to court for what is basic network hygiene.
What you're advocating is like having google, disable their spamfilter and me then having to sue every single spammer that sends me spam mail.
[0] https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200167736-H...
I'm not saying the same thing about routers.
Cloudflare is not operating routers that make the internet work. They act in the interest of their clients, not the internet in general.
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I would posit that, although speed is protected in many ways in the USA, there are cases where there are definite actions behind the speakers. And I would therefore argue, that when X person gives hatred against a group, and later takes violent actions against said group, their speech isn't just speech. It's a definite call to action of assault and murder.
I also recognize there are false flag operations that could demonize more legitimate groups. But then again, I don't believe that anti-war protestors, or the women protestors are going to advocate for killing Jews, blacks, and LGBT anytime soon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal
Poe's law can become a cudgel when paired with takedown rules that companies don't want to (or can't) enforce with the level of thought as a real court decision. I don't like cloudflare saying that they're totally absolved of responsibility, but I do have a lot of sympathy towards their CEO's complaint about being the gatekeeper. If I was in their shoes, I wouldn't want to have to try and formulate a policy rule that keeps Solanas but bans whatever satire or allegory the alt-right publishes.
However, Charlottesville, and their speakers should absolve any idea that this is a joke. These white supremacists actively call for violence against other, and then proceed to enact it.
The distinction here, is the "call to arms"->"illegal action directly related to call to arms". And I do believe that Cloudflare and others have a distinct responsibility in this.
Tl;Dr: say the shit you want, but once you bring violence into it, all bets are off.
In my opinion Cloudflare should not be in the business of making judgement calls one way or the other. The law exists for a reason and, as in this case, when a group is seen as acting outside the law, Cloudflare can be directed to terminate access. They need not preemptively act as judge, jury, and executioner themselves. Another issue is that when you start refusing to accept some group or another, it leads to an implicit endorsement of all the other groups. You can certainly find all sorts of completely abhorrent sites that utilize Cloudflare. A social campaign showing this sites while emphasizing that Cloudflare can, and does, refuse service to sites for what might be perceived as 'lesser crimes' would leave them in a difficult to handle situation. And this will happen. By contrast, not all that long ago they could have simply and eloquently responded, "We do not judge content."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Congressional_baseball_sh...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...
Their "we're only a neutral pipeline" spiel is complete bullshit and I'm glad they are being held accountable for it.
(Short version: They are not neutral because they provide a paid service for the websites they host.. Yes, in some cases it's a free service but in that case you are still "paying" in good publicity. The fact that no money changes hands doesn't suddenly make them a neutral party.
They are also absolutely a hosting provider. Even though they don't host the central, permanent, authorative data of the sites themselves, they still host plenty. They store images, code, stylesheets even complete pages in their cache. The data is on their servers, being pushed onto the internet from their ip's. They host the DNS. They can even host some business logic with their page rules.)
Without going into whether the rules that apply to webhosts are fair, it is a very good thing that Cloudflare is being held just as accountable as any other service provider. Their IP's, their responsibility just like any other party.
Edit: Those downvotes came quick. Care to comment on why you think Cloudflare should be held to a different standard than a traditional hosting provider?