Thanks, that's a really interesting take on the problem, and I tend to agree. It seems that once something becomes infrastructure (however that would be defined...either by your 50% rule or something more nuanced) it becomes heavily regulated, or at least governed by the principals of net neutrality.
We generally expect provider/customer relationships to be in good faith, and the generally expect free speech to happen in good faith, aka "I'm not relying on dirty tricks to persuade people." DS dropped their end, so I would feel no obligation to hold up my end.
I would oppose banning what they are saying in general, but I think it's entirely reasonable to no longer provide any services to them once they misuse the provider/customer relationship.
This isn't about content moderation to manage complaints. This is about protecting your company image specifically as a company that doesn't take sides.
DS tried to claim that the company was taking a side. CEO broke the relationship because of that.
If the CEO got complaints, and DS had said nothing about Cloudflare, and the company chose to drop the customer, then you'd have a point, but that's not what happened.
In fairness, that was actually DS's fault. They went and said "everyone else has banned us, but cloudflare hasn't. Cloudflare agree with what we stand for".
Cloudflares CEO responded by saying "It would be an objectivly bad thing for the world if I used my position as CEO of cloudflare to censor information and opinions. However, if DS's public standpoint is that if I'm not against them I must be with them, then I'm /definitely/ against them".
I think that's reasonable enough, it's pretty cheeky for DS to attempt to usurp cloudflares good name, and totally appropriate for cloudflare to push them under a bus as a response.
>So what do we do? I don't know. Privately-owned services should be free to censor. People should also continue to speak freely (if legal).
I wrote a long version of an answer to this, but it started to ramble a lot. Short version: once someone has 50% of the planet as a customer base, as facebook does, they're not a private company any more, they're a public utility. Even with a much smaller userbase, a company could be acting like a public utility in some countries. We should drop regulation and auditing on them like a tonne of bricks, same as we do other de-facto monopolies like the tax department. If companies don't want that, they should work to generate a marketplace of options for customers.