Daily Stormer, which has gone through 20+ domains in the past 18 months, was the first site to get kicked off Cloudflare for content/no court order, constant attacks on hosting facilities, etc.
Is it truly "censorship" though, if one is so aggressively distasteful and difficult to deal with that nobody wants to do business with them?
Daily Stormer was taken down as a result of 0 court orders. If I'm on someone's platform and I either break their rules repeatedly or invite attacks on them, it's not exactly censorship if they get tired of putting up with my shit and remove me. VPS operators repeatedly warn me that if I invite frequent DDoS attacks, they will remove me from the service. They have a say in how their own platform operates.
White national socialists/identitarians sell themselves as the most censored people on the Internet as if they hold information just begging to be released and practiced. Only, there's no redeeming value to the content of their information; it ranges from callous disregard of people based on race, to the outright extermination of anyone who disagrees with the cause. All of these "beliefs" effectively incite people to attack them, regardless of how well you may articulate them. It's little different from me repeatedly challenging blackhats to disable my VPS.
The only thing they really succeed in doing, is being the Internet's biggest pain in the ass to do business with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with what Cloudflare did.
Removing something perfectly legal, because public opinion is against them is cowardly.
Being a company that advertises DDoS mitigation and then drops a customer, because they get attacked a lot, is a cop out.
Being a company that will argue that they are not responsible for what their customers post legally, while by contrast dropping customers based on their content is pretty much censorship.
Don't think for a minute that dropping Daily Stormer wasn't just about public opinion and turning bad PR into good PR.
Cloudflare didn't drop Daily Stormer because of public opinion, but because of claims by Daily Stormer that Cloudflare supported Daily Stormer:
Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare.[1]
Dropping them for that is 100% justified in my book.
Why couldn't have they made a public statement that they do not endorse the Daily Stormer, reasserted that Cloudflare's business is not political activism and warned them that future claims like this would lead to termination? After all, Cloudflare's CEO describes the act itself as "dangerous", as a one-time act that would never happen again(at least, until someone else does the same thing?), etc..
The CEO doesn't seem to agree with you on this being 100% justified:
> 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 this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. … It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
(I was unable to source the claims that the Daily Stormer made about Cloudflare supporting them. I seem to remember the Daily Stormer denying they made those claims. It seems pretty important to know the actual catalyst for a major breach in company policy, but it doesn't seem to be reported anywhere I looked).
It can be, at least with regards to distasteful. “Difficult to work with” is clearly a perfectly acceptable reason to ditch a customer.
My reason for saying “can be” is that a few friends of mine are members of a fetish website which had to ban certain entirely legal (in the USA) content because all the (USA) payment providers found it too disgusting. (For extra irony, I think the entire premise of the site makes it illegal to view with images switched on in the UK where my friends are, but that presumably hasn’t had any effect on the payment providers or my friends might have mentioned it).
Yes, but the “any domain with sci-hub in it can be taken down without further legal action” is not standard for actions against domains; usually it is seizure or other action against specific domains.
Cloudflare isn’t a monopoly/chokepoint to the extent that actions against domain registries (via registrars) are.
This is an important point, although in practice the publisher would not go after your talk site, even if they are seemingly given the legal power to do so, meaning that the legal system never corrects itself from issuing these overly broad injunctions (until it's too late and someone deliberately abuses this weakness).
What's more worrying is what happens when the publishers go back to court to complain that Sci-Hub are changing their name to avoid the block, from sci-hub -> sky-hab -> psy-hob -> buy-tub -> fly-tab -> ... At what point does the court just empower the publisher to shut down any site they choose, like a DMCA takedown request?
> At what point does the court just empower the publisher to shut down any site they choose, like a DMCA takedown request?
It's not that big of a problem as you think. even if there's no stipulation that it can only be used to shut down the science paper sharing site operated by Alexandra Elbakyan, it's the intent that matters. using it to shut down [unrelated site] will likely land them in hot waters with the judge.
Of course, the Plaintiffs have no reason to do this to a random joe - it's more interesting when it happens to someone the ACS would be legitimately interested in pursuing. Reading the language of the injuction and amendment, it seems that the focus isn't even so much on sci-hub itself, but rather protecting the copyrighted material of the ACS. It seems like Ebalkyan could host a sci-hub-sans-acs.org with materials not copyrighted by the ACS. It also seems that you can't really trick it by having say, Ms Janina Kowalska registering centrum-nauki.org and serving all the content that appears on sci-hub.
I'm also not clear on the specific mechanics behind the injunction. Let's say that Ebalkyan does create sci-hub-sans-acs.org and claims all the copyrighted works are removed, can they still block it preemptively? Does Ebalkyan have to submit evidence that she's removed the copyrighted works? Can they demand action against anyone else that "seems" to be sci-hub? Is there a level of evidence they must meet? It kinda sucks to be ignorant of a legal system which can have so much impact in your life...
If they shut down a competitors site and then claim it was just a mistake they will probably not be in trouble at all but they would cause a lot of trouble for their competitor.
