Disaster Meet Michael Price, the CEO of Cloudflare/champion of free speech and ONLY DEFENSE between websites and "people who want to take them down"- The Verge - "What’s different about us than other companies is that we’re willing to talk about it"

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MASSIVE interview because this retard rambles and says nothing so I'm only going to post the pre-interview and the Kiwifarms question


Today, I’m talking with Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince. Cloudflare might be the most important internet company you’ve never heard of, and that’s almost by design. It’s a network infrastructure provider to more than 20 percent of the entire web — it’s effectively what prevents bad actors around the world from torpedoing some of the biggest websites on the planet with cyberattacks. But if Cloudflare is doing its job, you don’t have to know it even exists.

Cloudflare is an absolutely fascinating company at the intersection of so many of the biggest ideas we talk about here on Decoder. That’s in no small part because of Matthew, who’s been at the helm for nearly 15 years and has had to make some of the most uncomfortable moderation decisions in the tech industry.

As an infrastructure company, Cloudflare is one of the only defenses — in some cases, the only defense — standing between websites and the people who want to take them down. That includes websites for social good, like news organizations around the world, but also means unsavory or downright despicable ones, like neo-Nazi haven The Daily Stormer and hate and harassment breeding ground 8chan.

Over the last decade, Matthew has had to make the call when to stop providing service to websites like those, even as he’s championed Cloudflare as a bastion of free speech and a tool used by journalists, activists, and dissidents in authoritarian regimes. It is a profound balancing act, and you’ll hear me ask Matthew how he thinks about making those types of decisions and the company values he says drives them.
Matthew and I got into pretty much the whole gamut of protecting speech on the internet. We talked about the contrast between speech in the US covered by the First Amendment and speech overseas that is very much not. We got into how governments might be able to regulate companies like Cloudflare and what that would even look like here in the US or perhaps in a country like India.

And we discussed how Cloudflare looks at its role in war zones like Ukraine and how the threat of a splintering internet — or one that’s just more restrictive and more aggressively under attack from bad actors — could undo the last 40 years of progress. None of this is theoretical for people like Matthew — seriously, he’s personally under sanction by the Russian government.

Some notes before we start — because this conversation really went places and you’re going to hear a lot of references to various political philosophers. Aristotle comes up, which Matthew explains, but then we talk about Thomas Hobbes, who believed that nature is cruel and anarchic and the purpose of government is to enforce a social contract between citizens.

We also mention John Locke, who expanded the idea of the social contract into what we call liberalism and whose work directly influenced the founding fathers and shaped the Declaration of Independence, and then we mention John Rawls, who moved away from the idea of an unchanging natural law into fairness as the foundation of the social contract.
This is a lot for a conversation with a guy who keeps websites on the internet, but it is very much why I love doing Decoder.
Okay: Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, here we go.


You’re talking a lot about values and mission. It’s interesting to hear the CEO of what is effectively an infrastructure company talk about running that company on values and mission. Those things do come to a head. There’s a tension there that occasionally comes to a head. I think you can probably guess I’m going to ask you about The Daily Stormer and 8chan and Kiwi Farms. These are sites that relied on Cloudflare. They were Cloudflare customers. They hosted a bunch of hate speech, a bunch of racism. They did a bunch of harassment. They were Nazis in some cases.
Then you said, “Look, you’re not going to be our customers anymore.” And Cloudflare is big enough that when you say that, people do want to knock a bunch of Nazis off the internet, and their sites went down because Cloudflare wasn’t standing in the way. Walk me through that decision because there’s a real tension between “We are here to protect speech and the internet that we know” and “We know that if we stop doing business with you based on our values, you will get DDoSed off the internet.”


I don’t want to dismiss that these are tricky issues, but they are not daily issues for us. For the most part, our business is pretty straightforward. There are things that are illegal in various parts of the world, and in those places of the world, we comply with the laws. There are then things that are legal but may be gross in various ways. Someone might say, “Oh, I don’t like that.” And for the most part, we say, “Well, that’s what the legislative process is for.” That tends to actually work surprisingly well.

Cloudflare is 13 years old now, and we’ve had sort of three of these big incidents over that period of time. The mean time between incidents is a little over four years at this point. It’s not like every single day we’re wringing our hands and thinking about it. I think that that’s different than if you’re Facebook or Twitter, who really are every single day having to make these decisions, and they have a much harder job because they are fundamentally the content. In our case, in order for somebody to have gotten to us, it has to be an individual makes a kind of gross decision to post something, which then doesn’t get taken down by a platform, doesn’t get taken down by a host, and falls all the way down to the network level, which there are a lot of layers that have to have gone wrong there.
But every once in a while, it is bound that that is going to happen. It tends to be places that are still technically maybe legal but are really harmful and destructive. In some cases, places where we’ve actually worked with law enforcement, they’ve said, “We are very worried that if this site is still online, you might see a mass shooting or you might see something else.” It’s one of those questions where, if you’re living in an apartment building, generally, it’s not cool to spy on what your neighbors are doing in the apartment next door. But if you see someone whose life is in danger, then yeah, you break down the door and you go help them. But that wouldn’t be what you normally do. Every once in a while, we have to do that.

I think the thing that is different about how we think about it than how most companies think about it… and I’ve had the privilege to get to sit in on a lot of the public policy chats that folks like Facebook or Twitter / X or AWS or Google or Apple have had. I think if you sat in on those, you would actually feel a lot better about the companies. I think that they are almost always incredibly thoughtful people that are behind this and that have tradeoffs that you might not imagine. But I think that what a lot of tech companies really believe in is they trust their own internal bubble. They don’t trust the rest of the world. So they have this almost militant secrecy about them, which I think is actually one of the real mistakes that the tech industry today is making. Whereas we really take a very transparent view of this. I have to confess that I didn’t expect that I would spend a significant portion of the time that I talk to journalists for the rest of my career talking about neo-Nazis because it’s not really a topic I actually spend all that much time thinking about.

But I think that the thing that we’ve done is that when we have come to these hard issues, we haven’t just said, “Paragraph 13G of our terms of service, beyond that, no comment.” We’ve tried to walk through: here’s why this is hard and here’s why we struggle with it and here’s the good and here’s the bad and here’s why these are tricky issues. It just happens to be that neo-Nazis are about the grossest thing that you could imagine, and so people who are trying to be gross either are or pretend to be neo-Nazis. So you get tough conversations around this. What’s different about us than other companies is that we’re willing to talk about it, whereas most other companies don’t. The reason we’re willing to do that is that I think transparency is key to trust.

When this first of all went down with The Daily Stormer, I tried to figure out how, when you get into these situations, do you show that you are being thoughtful and responsible. And I actually went back and pulled down a bunch of philosophy textbooks, and I started out reading James Madison because I thought, “Okay, in the US, we have the First Amendment. Where does that come from and what’s behind it?” Because it turns out, if you go to Germany and you say, “Well, what about the First Amendment?” everyone rolls their eyes, and I think it’s the wrong place to start.

I think the right place to start is actually around the rule of law, and Madison was really inspired by Aristotle so I went back and read all my Aristotle textbooks. Aristotle really believed that there were three things that were inherent for a government to be trustworthy: it had to be transparent; it had to be consistent; and it had to be accountable. So you need to know what the laws were, they needed to be consistently applied, and then the people who applied the laws had to be subject to the laws themselves. So that’s basically what government is. It’s really amazing, around the world, even totalitarian governments that don’t really follow the rule of law pretend to. They pretend to be transparent.
 
Specifically when asked about Kiwifarms

But I think that the thing that we’ve done is that when we have come to these hard issues, we haven’t just said, “Paragraph 13G of our terms of service, beyond that, no comment.” We’ve tried to walk through: here’s why this is hard and here’s why we struggle with it and here’s the good and here’s the bad and here’s why these are tricky issues. It just happens to be that neo-Nazis are about the grossest thing that you could imagine, and so people who are trying to be gross either are or pretend to be neo-Nazis. So you get tough conversations around this. What’s different about us than other companies is that we’re willing to talk about it, whereas most other companies don’t. The reason we’re willing to do that is that I think transparency is key to trust.

Null=BTFO

Could have just talked to him what's the problem?
 
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Big yikesey doodle

Also archive that shit:

vergescourge.png

I guess nobody bothered to archive a Matthew Prince interview mentioning Kiwi Farms for over 14 hours because they were bored to death.
 
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It just happens to be that neo-Nazis are about the grossest thing that you could imagine, and so people who are trying to be gross either are or pretend to be neo-Nazis. So you get tough conversations around this. What’s different about us than other companies is that we’re willing to talk about it, whereas most other companies don’t.
Meet the furries, zoophiles, and monkey torturers. I swear to god these people don't use the internet at all. SOMEBODY ask these fucks the hard questions!
 
Meet Michael Price, the CEO of Cloudflare
Can we fix his name?

The podcast episode can be downloaded. It's 78 MB, and incorrectly dated 2018 in the metadata. I'm not going to upload it and waste that space, but maybe someone will want to clip it.

But the way that the bad thing that happened was that a bunch of people were then able to do a DDoS attack. Your power is, in that case, contingent on knowing that there’s a universe of actors who will then immediately knock The Daily Stormer off the internet. That’s the relationship in your role specifically that I think is interesting. A hosting company has a different power, which is, “I’ll just delete your website.” An internet service provider says, “We’re just going to block your IP address.” You’re saying, “I’m going to get out of the way so the mob can tear you down.” That feels like a different kind of power or a different expression of accountability. How did you think about that?

There’s some truth to that. The thing about hosting providers is there are lots of them. The thing about Cloudflare is that there are very few companies that can provide the services that we do, and if you piss all of us off, it’s really hard to still be on the internet.

Because there’s a mob of people who will take you down. But that’s the thing. It seems like it’s okay to say, “I’m not going to be your security guard anymore.”

Yeah, I guess, although it turns out, if you’re running something even completely innocuous today, there’s real risk that’s out there. You need an immune system in order to just stay online, even if you’re posting cute pictures of kittens. And so it’s not just the neo-Nazis that get knocked offline. Everything, at some point, needs some level of a security guard, or again, something like an immune system, to stay online. If you don’t have that, there’s just enough badness out there looking for vulnerabilities that it’s hard to stop. And then, in addition to that, just the advantages that we’re able to provide in terms of performance, in terms of cost, just being able to make sure your content is available everywhere in a cost-effective way. If you have to exist in a world without a Cloudflare, it’s just a lot more expensive to operate.

So again, I think it comes back to that question that we asked ourselves when we were eight people above a nail salon, which was, “If we ran the entire internet, what would the right policy be?” And again, we will never run the entire internet. That’s just never going to happen. But I think that that’s the right mentality to think about these questions from, because I think it puts the right level of seriousness into the discussion. None of these sites paid us anything that mattered, right? If the only thing that we were motivated by was just money, I mean, it’s easy. Of course you should kick these things off. But again, I think we really do believe that we are very principled, we’re very mission-driven. And I think that’s part of what sometimes gets us into these sorts of challenges. But I’m really proud that the team that we have is thinking about them, and I hope it sets a good example for a lot of startups and also companies that are a lot larger than we are.

It’s cool that today, regularly, companies that are much, much, much larger than Cloudflare that run into the same issues call us up and say, “Hey, we’d love your advice on this.” I’m proud of the fact that that’s a role that we’re playing, and I think that that’s an important bit as we think about how we are going to ensure that the internet still exists because I don’t think that’s inevitable.
 
Null has pointed out that Cloudflare shutting down access to websites due to the mob demanding it is really bad for their bottom line. As before Cloudflare enjoyed a comfortable monopoly. Because they started doing this it's caused even more demands to shut down websites, some from world governments. The more they keep listening to these demands (or get legally forced to) the more it starts a groundswell for competitors to arise. First it's Kiwifarms, then it's porn sites, then it's piracy websites. A lot of these websites have money too and would be willing to fund even more DDoS mitigator competitors. And eventually Cloudflare is put into a position where they make substantially less money. Since before Cloudflare would just set a price and go "This is what you pay, pay it or else no ddos mitigation" and now they have to go "Okay this is market rate, pay it please".

It's really the worst situation Prince has put himself in. He's essentially trying to lie and claim that he's totally pro free speech except you can't coax the cat back into the bag. It's only a matter of time until credit card processors demand he keep shutting down websites and the irrelevance of Cloudflare begins.
 
I think the thing that is different about how we think about it than how most companies think about it… and I’ve had the privilege to get to sit in on a lot of the public policy chats that folks like Facebook or Twitter / X or AWS or Google or Apple have had. I think if you sat in on those, you would actually feel a lot better about the companies. I think that they are almost always incredibly thoughtful people that are behind this and that have tradeoffs that you might not imagine.
Tradeoffs and thoughtfulness like posting a well drafted statement unequivocally stating they won't be dropping Kiwifarms' services and then following that up with verbal diarrhea abloo-blooing about "imminent threats to human life" or whatever wank you woke up and typed out as LFJ pegged you? emot-allears.gif
 
Greetings, fellow Neo-Nazis.

Funny doggo man in Serbia will unite the Kiwi Farmers into a single ethnostate that will die out in a generation because we are all unfuckable weirdos but there will be many lulz and memes. There will also be shitposting.

And we will have our own time zone: Standard Moon Time.

Won't you support the cause?
 
Tradeoffs and thoughtfulness like posting a well drafted statement unequivocally stating they won't be dropping Kiwifarms' services and then following that up with verbal diarrhea abloo-blooing about "imminent threats to human life" or whatever wank you woke up and typed out as LFJ pegged you? View attachment 5891778
Big talk from a neo-nazi. When you're ready to have a tough talk about why you aren't personally sanctioned by the Russian government let us know, bud
 
Those organizations tended to be civil society and human rights organizations. So we woke up one day back in 2010, and it was like every human rights organization in the world had signed up for Cloudflare. There was a part of me that was like, “Gosh, why do we care about this? Because they’re never going to pay us much, so we’re not going to make money, and we’re not going to impress our parents.” But they keep signing up, and they would write in and say, “Hey, it’s so useful what you do.” And if you’re a human rights organization, you’re often pissing someone off and often someone powerful. And so the powerful people would try to knock them offline, and we would protect them.
I remember there was a guy who ran an organization called the Committee to Protect Journalists. His name was Jeffrey. He wrote to me one day, and he’s like, “Hey, I’ve got three Cloudflare customers that are in town. Would you like to meet them?” I rolled my eyes. Michelle was watching me. She’s like, “Matthew, just take the meeting. It’s 15 minutes. You never know what comes out of these things.” And Jeffrey brought into our office — we were on Third Street in San Francisco — these three African journalists. One was from Angola, one was from Ethiopia, and the third, they wouldn’t tell us his name or where he was from because he was currently being hunted by death squads. It was the first meeting I’d ever been in where the term “death squad” had been used. We’re fortunate to live in the West, but in most of the world, journalism is very dangerous and everywhere is an incredibly noble profession. In these cases, these journalists were covering largely government corruption in their home countries and people wanted to shut them up.
He probably thought he sounded like a typical business bro here, but in the audio version of this interview he came across as a complete sociopath to me. The whole "everyone makes a business so they can impress their parents" thing he had was very strange, too.
 
The whole "everyone makes a business so they can impress their parents" thing he had was very strange, too.
Lol no. People make businesses to make loads of money so they can then fuck around and do whatever they want.

Michael Price is thinking of them. Who will stand up for pedos and animal abusers if Kiwifarms keeps documenting them?

I have a VERY strange feeling that Matt is a regular on some absolutely horrific sites....
 
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We're mentioned entirely once and it's because the journalist brings it up and he won't even say our name or discuss the case, despite waffling on forever about every other question

It just shows you that he knows he's a coward and he's ashamed of it, and he dropped us because of social pressure

There's a reason oathbreakers and sellouts are despised Matthew
 
We're mentioned entirely once and it's because the journalist brings it up and he won't even say our name or discuss the case, despite waffling on forever about every other question

It just shows you that he knows he's a coward and he's ashamed of it, and he dropped us because of social pressure

There's a reason oathbreakers and sellouts are despised Matthew
Not to mention he immediately lumped it in with "they're literally neo-nazi's" when that's never been a claim by anyone anywhere about the site lol he's such a coward, can't just say "I didn't like them it's my business and this is America"
 
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