Cloudflare CEO Just Can’t Live With Himself After Firing Nazis From Internet

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By Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, published in WSJ

I helped kick a group of neo-Nazis off the internet last week, but since then I’ve wondered whether I made the right decision. I’m the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. We run a global network that makes internet applications faster and protects them from cyberattacks. If you haven’t heard of us, I’m not surprised. We’re part of the internet’s infrastructure, one of the groups operating behind the scenes to bring you everything you enjoy online.

Although Cloudflare isn’t a household name, nearly 10% of all internet requests from 2.8 billion people pass through our network each month. We have almost 10 million customers, from small businesses to large financial institutions. During the 2016 presidential election, 17 major-party candidates used Cloudflare to protect their campaigns from hackers. ( Hillary Clinton was the notable exception.) Chances are you’ve used our network hundreds of times in the past 24 hours and, if we’re doing our job, all you’ve noticed is fast internet.

Nearly all of our clients are upstanding people and businesses. But every once in a while, someone will use one of our services to protect content I would consider repugnant. Such was the case with the Daily Stormer, a bulletin board for self-proclaimed white supremacists.

The site was used to help plan the neo-Nazi demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va. After Heather Heyer was murdered there, the Daily Stormer’s founder and editor mocked her as a “fat, childless 32-year-old slut” and a “drain on society.” By any reasonable standard it was vile. Not surprisingly, the site was constantly targeted by anti-Nazi hackers trying to knock it offline. Cloudflare had helped foil those cyberattacks until last week when I pulled the plug.

At some level, it’s easy to fire Nazis as customers. They don’t pay you much, if anything, since Cloudflare offers a free version of its service. Our terms of use give us broad discretion to choose whom we allow to use our network. Beyond the horrible content, the Daily Stormer began claiming that we secretly supported their ideology, causing a major distraction to our team. Firing a Nazi customer gets you glowing notes from around the world thanking you for standing up to hate.

But a week later, I continue to worry about this power and the potential precedent being set. The reality of today’s internet is that if you are publishing anything even remotely controversial, your site will get cyberattacked. Without a massive global network similar to Cloudflare’s, it is nearly impossible to withstand the barrage. Only a small group of companies–names you know, like Facebook , Google and Microsoft , along with a handful of others you may not, like Cloudflare–have sufficient scale to keep their users online.

The upshot is that a few private companies have effectively become the gatekeepers to the public square–the blogs and social media that serve as today’s soapboxes and pamphlets. If a handful of tech executives decide to block you from their services, your content effectively can’t be on the internet.

Before terminating the Daily Stormer, Cloudflare’s policy had been to stay neutral to the content that used our network. We’d comply with the law in the jurisdictions where we operate, but we wouldn’t bow to political or public pressure to boot anyone off our network. And make no mistake, there is pressure: Hackers actually tweeted to us asking that we get out of the way so they could take down the Daily Stormer.

When standing up to government requests or angry Twitter demands to silence unpopular speech, it was powerful to be able to say we’d never terminated a customer due to political pressure. I’m not sure we can say that anymore.

I’d like to fall back on the First Amendment. I’m the son of a journalist. I grew up with discussions around the dinner table on the importance of freedom of speech. But the First Amendment doesn’t compel private companies to let anyone broadcast on their platforms. Moreover, Cloudflare operates infrastructure in 70 countries, few of which have anything approaching American-style speech protections.

Yet in all nations, there is (or should be) a reasonable expectation of due process. It is the idea that no one is penalized without first receiving a fair hearing and a fair shake. In civilized societies, the law is applied equally by independent decision makers, not capriciously by mobs and tyrants.

Did we meet the standard of due process in this case? I worry we didn’t. And at some level I’m not sure we ever could. It doesn’t sit right to have a private company, invisible but ubiquitous, making editorial decisions about what can and cannot be online. The pre-internet analogy would be if Ma Bell listened in on phone calls and could terminate your line if it didn’t like what you were talking about.

Cloudflare is an expert at stopping cyberattacks, but we do not have the expertise to pass judgment on which of our 20 trillion monthly internet requests is racist, reprehensible or offensive. Even if we could solve the technical challenge of filtering them out, hidden behind the scenes is a problem of political legitimacy.

We’re going to have a long debate at Cloudflare to think these issues over. But terminating the Daily Stormer is likely to be the exception that proves the importance of content neutrality. My moral compass alone should not determine who gets to stay online.