Far Right Website Sparks Free Speech Debate

A company that protects websites from online attacks has stopped serving a far right website. But the man who made the decision says he feels uneasy about making such decisions.

Cloudflare is designed to protect against denial of service attacks, in which people try to bring down a website by flooding it with bogus requests until it's inaccessible to legitimate traffic by real people. It's a tactic often used by hacker groups protesting against the organizations running the site, though it's also been used as a form of cyberwarfare.

To combat such attacks, data going to and from the websites of Cloudflare customers is routed via Cloudflare's own server. This routing is controlled not only to optimize the speed for legitimate site visitors, but also to recognize and block attacks. Cloudflare also caches copies of the customer site so that it can provide these copies even if the site itself is unreachable for any reason.

Site Attacks Charlottesville Victim

An estimated 10 percent of all web traffic goes via Cloudflare, which covers a wide range of sites. Until recently, this included Daily Stormer, a site that contains white supremacist content. Last week the site printed disparaging material about Heather Heyer, the woman who protested against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville and was killed when a car drove into the crowd. (Source: bbc.co.uk)

That material prompted several sites to stop providing services to Daily Stormer. Both GoDaddy and Google cancelled their registration services for the site's website address, meaning visitors had to type in the IP address (a string of numbers identifying the computer hosting the site content) instead.

Cloudflare initially continued serving Daily Stormer, a move it says was based on the principle of supporting the right to free speech. It's chief Matthew Prince says "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." (Source: cloudflare.com)

Boss Personally Conflicted

Prince later discovered that Daily Stormer staff had made claims that Cloudflare had kept serving the site because it secretly supported the extreme right wing ideology. That led to Prince banning Daily Stormer from using the Cloudflare service. The removal of the protection means opponents of Daily Stormer have been able to make it virtually unreachable.

While many have congratulated Prince, he says he's extremely uneasy about making the decision, despite personally considering the site as "vile". He says that the threat of denial-of-service attacks (and the lack of rivals to Cloudflare) mean that in effect he is able to decide whether a controversial website is able to be viewed, which makes him uncomfortable.

He also says that his decision breached his own point of principle, and means it could be harder to fight demands from aggressive governments to take down material such as pages voicing political opposition or exposing corruption.

What's Your Opinion?

Was Cloudflare right to stop serving Daily Stormer? Where should web companies draw the line between giving everyone a voice and not enabling the distribution of extreme views and material? Is it concerning that a private company has so much effective control over which sites are reachable?