There's a pretty big difference between terminating a business relationship (which is what Cloudflare did to Daily Stormer, and which Google also did a couple days before Cloudflare did) and refusing to answer DNS queries for third-party domains with which there is no business relationship. It's hard to imagine how the former could be used as precedent to compel the latter.

Cloudflare has no interest in censorship -- the whole reason the Daily Stormer thing was such a big deal was because it's the only time Cloudflare has ever terminated a customer for objectionable content. Be sure to read the blog post to understand: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

(Disclosure: I work for Cloudflare but I'm not in a position to set policy.)

I probably should have made a clearer point instead of linking to TorrentFreak.

I did not mean that I was worried that CloudFlare's DNS would start blocking sites whose content they disagree with (although that would also be worrisome).

I'm worried that copyright holders might be able to use the Daily Stormer case as a precedent to force CloudFlare to stop offering services to infringing sites.

If they are able to do that, I can also see them attempting to force CloudFlare to remove DNS entries as well.

Right, as I said, it's hard for me to see how one could be used as precedent for the other given how different the situations are. And if you could use it, you could just as easily do the same against Google DNS.

I'm not a lawyer, though.

Bear in mind, they dropped Daily Stormer because they were claiming Cloudflare agreed with their ideology. Which someone in the previous discussion pointed out was a Terms of Service violation.

DNS resolving offers no such terms and no such reason to make such a claim. I don't see that playing here. And bear in mind, when the CEO did it, he wrote about how dangerous it was that companies had that power. I don't feel other companies running other DNS services hold that level of concern or awareness.

When you consider that their "competitor" in the space of free DNS resolvers with easy-to-remember IPs is Google, who recently tried blocking the word "gun" in Google Shopping... it's hard not to see the introduction of a Cloudflare DNS resolver as at least a net positive for resisting censorship. And more options is almost always better.

Cloudflare is a private company and they're free to do what they want but their reasoning for the Daily Stormer termination felt like a convenient excuse to me. I'm sure that it was the best business decision for them but when I read a blog post touting 1.1.1.1 as being anti-censorship, I roll my eyes.

Anti-censorship so long as Matthew Prince doesn't have a bad morning.

I run my own DNS-over-TLS resolver at a trusted hosting provider. It upstreams to a selection of roots for which I have reasonable trust. My resolver does DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-HTTPS, and plain DNS. Multiple listening ports for the secure stuff so that I have something that works for most circumstances.

I would still take someone who can have a bad morning and decide to censor one site (and then write about how concerning that power is), over entities that regularly view it as their "responsibility" to shut down sites and remove content they find objectionable.

I think it's great if people are running their own DNS. :) But I'm certainly not mad that Cloudflare's offering yet another public alternative. As I said, more choices is better.

Running your own root content DNS server isn't particularly hard, note. The public root content DNS server operators are not interested in serving up dummy answers for all sorts of internal stuff that leaks out to the root content DNS servers any more than you are interested in sending it to them. (-:

>because they were claiming Cloudflare agreed with their ideology.

That was a lie. It was a commenter on an article.

My tendency would be to ask for some sort of proof, though I realize asking for proof of nonexistence of evidence is near impossible. I'm inclined at present to place more trust in Cloudflare's word at this point, but I try to keep an open mind. It's always good to know both sides' stories.

Well, you have the CloudFlare blog where Prince states "The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology."[0] So, all that is necessary is to find this statement. I won't link to it but the Daily Stormer has been active on the clear web for most of the time intervening the seizure of their domain and now. Prince never provided any proof for his claim, not even a screenshot. Of course, a screenshot would have given away, via the visual context, that the statement wasn't from the "team" but from a forum commenter presenting the notion in a joking manner.

As it happens, an internal memo "leaked" to the media wherein Prince admitted he pulled the plug on The Daily Stormer because they are "assholes" and admitted that “The Daily Stormer site was bragging on their bulletin boards about how Cloudflare was one of them."[1] These forums are also what served as the area for readers to comment on articles. Ergo, he acknowledged that he knew his statement about the Daily Stormer "team" claiming CloudFlare supported their ideology was a lie.

You also have to go back in time and consider the context in which The Daily Stormer was successively de-platformed. The site had been publishing low-brow racist commentary including jokes about pushing Jews into ovens and referring to Africans as various simian species for years. It was, however, a single article wherein they mocked the woman who died at the Charlottesville, VA conflict between the alt-right and antifa that led to the widespread outrage that resulted in the The Daily Stormer being temporarily kicked off the internet.[2]

At the same time that Cloudflare was banning the Daily Stormer, they were (and still are, AFAIK) providing services to pro-pedophilia and ISIS web sites. The Daily Stormer itself pointed out not only the hypocrisy of this situation but also the risk it created to CloudFlare's continued safe harbor protections.[3]

[0]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ [1]: https://gizmodo.com/cloudflare-ceo-on-terminating-service-to... [2]: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/da... [3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20180401233331/https://dailystor...

You seem to know an awful lot about this specific case, and I'll defer to you on that. I know about the general case, technically speaking (though merely a DNS hobbyist).

However, having a business relationship with another organization is not a right. Hate speakers are not a protected class.

DNS does not operate in the same manner nor with the same assumptions. One can obviously run their own DNS resolver as has been pointed out repeatedly in this thread.

Please list the, "pro-pedophilia and ISIS web sites." hosted by Cloudflare?

Edit: There's probably a business opportunity for a registrar/DNS provider/host that operates under 'free speech purism,' though it's hard to say it won't go the way of usenet in that regard.

>Please list the, "pro-pedophilia and ISIS web sites." hosted by Cloudflare?

It's in the linked archived DS article and I confirmed the information is still true.

Actually, they have already suspended the service for sci-hub, albeit under a court order.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/02/05/1944225/cloudflare-t...

The Galileo link works for me. It's worth pointing out Google at the very least censors as easily as Cloudflare [1].

My understanding of Cloudflare's policies though are with the exception of exceptionally objectionable content, Cloudflare only takes sites down in response to a court order. I don't know if it has been established that DNS is something which operators have a proactive obligation to censor, but I imagine it's the kind of thing Cloudflare would go to court over.

1- https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/8/14/16143820/g...

"I wish that they talked a bit more about their stance regarding censorship. They have a small paragraph talking about the problem, but they don't talk about the "solution"."

I think there's a good way to put this to the test - establish a DNS "mixer" that will randomly direct DNS requests to either 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 or (whatever) and let the public have access to it.

In this way, Cloudflare would bear some small expense from processing these DNS requests (essentially zero) but would receive no information about the initial requestor.

It would be interesting to run this experiment and perhaps see some real traffic on the DNS mixer ... and then see how cloudflare responds.

Would they block the mixer ?