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Who Gets to Decide Who Has a Voice Online?

6 min readAug 17, 2017

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Matthew Prince appears on stage at the 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt Europe — Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for TechCrunch

By Brian Feldman

Yesterday, the last domino in a long chain fell when Cloudflare terminated its service with the Daily Stormer, a white-supremacist website. Cloudflare, which provides a number of services that work behind the scenes to make websites more stable and faster, had spent months debating the ultimate problem customer. In an internal email yesterday, obtained by Gizmodo, CEO Matthew Prince was blunt in assessing how the company had finally reached its decision: Prince had exercised his ultimate authority on the matter.

He wrote:

This was my decision. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.

Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up…

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New York Magazine
New York Magazine

Published in New York Magazine

Defining the news, culture, fashion, food, and personalities that drive New York.

New York Magazine
New York Magazine

Written by New York Magazine

Defining the news, culture, fashion, food, and personalities that drive New York.

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