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Who Gets to Decide Who Has a Voice Online?
Cloudflare kicked the Daily Stormer offline in part because it could
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…
