Something requiring decent scale is totally different than being a natural monopoly. There were plenty of DDoS protection options on the market. I can't grow my own wheat, build my own car, or DDoS protect my own website - these all require economies of scale. But they aren't natural monopolies, there's plenty of competition in each space. On the other hand, internet is a natural monopoly because the capital costs are so high and are relatively inelastic with the number of users served.

>Something requiring decent scale is totally different than being a natural monopoly. There were plenty of DDoS protection options on the market.

Is it? There were a few DDoS protection services on the market, but they seemingly all dropped KF, so what then? Is that not analogous to kicked out by every ISP?

>I can't grow my own wheat, build my own car [...] - these all require economies of scale. But they aren't natural monopolies, there's plenty of competition in each space. On the other hand, internet is a natural monopoly because the capital costs are so high and are relatively inelastic with the number of users served.

You probably can grow your own wheat or build your own car. But I like your definition of monopoly.

I would say that more generally, that a monopoly is any business that has insufficient competition to motivate them from abusing their stakeholders (including customers, workers, etc.).

Kiwi Farms is offline not because CloudFlare refuses to do business with them, but because everybody collectively refuses to do business with them. Otherwise they could just have gone to a competitor.

One can still find what happened to them chilling, but that doesn't make CloudFlare a "common carrier."

What happened to Kiwi Farms was that no-one wanted to do business with them from a risk-management and just general good-moral-fiber basis.

>What happened to Kiwi Farms was that no-one wanted to do business with them from a risk-management and just general good-moral-fiber basis.

While it's a somewhat different example and a bit reductive, I find this XKCD[0] to be relevant to the issues with Kiwi Farms.

I run several websites on my physical hardware and through the internet links for which I pay. I don't want (and won't allow) any speech on my private property that I don't wish to host or amplify.

If the government (as Florida's appears to wish to do) tries to tell me what content I must (or must not) publish (assuming it's protected speech under the First Amendment), not only won't I comply, I will scream bloody murder -- as it's a direct violation of the First Amendment -- because the government is involved.

What is it that strips other non-governmental entities of those same rights? Absolutely nothing.

Do I like much of the nastiness, trolling and disinformation that's out there? Nope. Which is another good reason (I abandoned the big "social media" companies nearly a decade ago because I objected to their business models) not to use the big "social media" players.

And whether you agree or disagree with those who do use such platforms, it's their choice to use them or not. Just as it's those (and every) platforms' right to host or not host any particular speech/expression.

I don't understand why technical folks don't understand this. If the government can force you to host speech you don't want to host on your own private property, then property rights are irrelevant.

As for the whole "common carrier" thing in relation to the big "social media" platforms, they don't have exclusive access to rights-of-way (e.g., last mile conduit for wired internet access, ownership of the cell towers, etc.). Setting up your own site is simple and cheap/free.

You have the right to free expression. You do not have a right to an audience.

If the big "social media" platforms (and/or platforms like Cloudflare, AWS, etc.) pull a 1357[0] on you, you do have recourse. Do it yourself. This isn't a complicated thing to understand, IMHO.

I'll say it again because I want to make it clear: I abandoned all the big "Social Media" platforms nearly a decade ago and find their practices and business models to be deeply offensive. What's more, I don't use Cloudflare or AWS or any other similar platforms.

So no, I'm not defending those corporations. At all. Rather, I'm defending the ideals of free expression.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1357/

The problem is that there are only a handful companies to do business with in the first place.

I think what you would expect in a sane market is that they are forced to negotiate a more expensive deal with the remaining service providers due to the supply/demand imbalance.

As there are so few service providers here, there's only a few levels of risk-tolerance/good-moral-fiber that you can negotiate on. Activists only need to push a site above the highest risk-tolerance level (which is unnaturally low due to this quantization)

I mean, yes and no. If you're loathsome enough, the asking price is going to be non-commercial for you, even in a perfect and infinitely deep market of providers.