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.
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.
