https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Misuse of trademarks is a thing.
I agree, however, that CF's policies are applied arbitrarily.
Yeah, and that's the difference, isn't it? 8kun might not condone any of these things, officially, but it very much enables and desires them.
This kind of discourse is seen as the "price of freedom", its presence a demonstration of absolute tolerance and blind faith in freedom of speech. Facebook, reddit, MySpace and Twitter are more strictly moderated and impose actual terms of service on their users' freedom of expression.
But of course this also means the people most motivated to join networks that offer guarantees of free speech absolutism are those whose discourse is not tolerated by these mainstream alternatives. And their presence will almost guarantee an absence of "normies" who don't run into the limits of their freedom of speech on the moderated networks much and feel uncomfortable around the former group.
Heck, the only reason 8chan ever became large enough to be widely known was because 4chan evicted Gamergate. And 4chan isn't exactly known for its strict moderation and suppression of political views.
It seems to me that if they want to be in this business they have to deal with these liabilities and complications, not hide behind some vague "our hands are tied" language.
If their argument is "we only retransmit what we get, with caching" then they are in the same place liability-wise as the phone providers ("We only retransmit what we et, with caching").
In other words, a common carrier.
Hosting is different. For exmaple, Youtube is not liable for what their users upload. They comply with takedown notices because they host the content, not the user.
Cloudflare is just a huge company actively ignoring abuse complaints and somehow they are getting away with it. It even helps their PR to a certain market segment.
They even still host kiwifarms, a board that is primarily known for its vicous harassment of people and is known to have driven multiple innocent people to suicide.
I consider CloudFlare a bad actor at this point and I wish the other big names around them would too. They are subsidizing crime with VC money.
At the moment, they have a very clear rule. If they stop providing services to obvious spammers, they will create lots of grey areas, and they will also implicitly make a judgement that the client they still serve are _good_ in some way, and an enterprising lawyer or muckraker might exploit that.