Free speech online: it’s more than just law

Recently, OVH Telecom, a massive server provider, pulled down theralphretort.com. I was very surprised to hear this news, but it seems legit: Speedy Sparrow resells OVH products, and OVH pulled down the server without much of a second thought.

I had previously considered OVH to be a neutral webhost, but it seems evident that they are in the ranks of the $5 VPS companies who really cannot afford litigation over one customer, like Digital Ocean, RamNode, et cetera. What’s even more surprising about this is that OVH has historically ignored DMCA requests and allowed seedbox providers to resell their servers — yet they bowed to a false harassment claim immediately. It seems like their policies have changed, so anyone running a website that is even mildly controversial should move if they do not make a statement.

It is actually relatively difficult to run a website that just respects US law, because at every level you have other third parties who attempt to impose their own “law” via Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy agreements. Webhosts are typically the worst offenders, and this has indeed affected many BBS in the past: the reason that so few unmoderated sites like 8chan.co exist has nothing to do with law. It has to do with the fact that if a troll sends an abuse report to the hosting provider and the content is still up at the time, most hosting providers will shut off their customers first and ask questions last.

If it happens enough times, they won’t even care what their customers have to say anymore. Not only that, many webhosts have very vague terms of what they do not allow which allows them to shut down whatever sites are giving them a hard time.

To combat this, many BBS have to get “moderators” to help them keep things “clean”. Unfortunately, large moderation teams are easily corrupted and people who do it for free and seek the ability to do so are almost always power hungry individuals. 8chan.co tries to avoid this by only giving Global Volunteer rights to those who have “earned” it by having large boards who delete spam and obviously illegal content like child pornography, because if they abuse their power they can lose the board they worked hard to build.

Another problem with having an unpopular opinion online is the threat of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks. The internet is engineered in such a way that the more people accessing a site, the slower it gets — while the web is indeed decentralized, it is not a distributed protocol like BitTorrent. If you manage to saturate a link to a site, you can take down the site for as long as you can keep it saturated. So, a site connected to the internet via a 10Gbps connection can be taken down just by someone who has a credit card and can buy that much in upload speed.

Plenty of people have claimed that the growing use of CloudFlare on the internet is a NSA conspiracy, and it may be at least in part. CloudFlare solves this age old issue cheaply—there of course exist other solutions, but a simple DDoS can run up tabs in the tens of thousands of dollars on Amazon CloudFront, while CloudFlare (Amazon charges around $180 per TB of transfer—that would be $2,520 for one month of 8chan.co!) just charges a flat fee. I like to think of CloudFlare as a kind of internet mafia. Everyone pays them some protection money every month, and they go protect whoever gets attacked. If you fail to pay your protection money, if you get attacked you instantly lose the ability to compete with people who are using CloudFlare (4chan and Krautchan, in our case). If you’re a known name, anyone with a stolen credit card can take your site down at will and then enjoy the shitshow on Twitter. LizardSquad attacking Blizzard is a recent example of this.

CloudFlare at least does not suspend service over false complaints, but instead, being a reverse proxy, automatically forwards them to upstream hosts. If the upstream hosts do nothing, then CloudFlare keeps working.

Finally, payment processors are the last thing that abuse report trolls attack. They are a bit less likely to bend, but they have done so before — Skrill and PayPal suspended Wikileaks although they had been charged with no crimes, for example. I think cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is one of the best innovations in the last decade because it’s finally starting to chip away at the power large payment processors hold over free speech online, so this is not even as much of an issue as it used to be. Bitcoin has no Terms of Service—if you know your private key, no one can seize your money.

It should worry people how easy it is to take down sites where users can upload content (or where authors write content that is legally protected but not popularly accepted). What abuse report trolls fail to take into account is that by attempting to censor speech, you legitimize it because you admit you are afraid of it. The Ralph Retort will just keep switching hosts, and the lights at 8chan.co will stay on for as long as we can pay the bills.

If the last fifteen years of internet history are proof of anything, it’s that censors never win. New technology is making abuse report trolling obsolete, and companies who fall for it like OVH are going to be in for a rude awakening when their customers move to impartial webhosts like PRQ and incorruptible payment networks like Bitcoin.