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 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.
That was a lie. It was a commenter on an article.
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...
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.
It's in the linked archived DS article and I confirmed the information is still true.
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.