> Private companies should not be the de facto moderators of free speech in our society. They are forced into that position by woefully inadequate governance by legal authorities

I feel frustrated by this debate; do people really believe that having every speech question litigated in court is good for freedom of expression online?

My take has been for a while now that having multiple layers of enforcement for rules is a good thing because it allows for flexibility. It's bad for us to have only two categories for speech:

- morally obligated to host without question.

- will get you hauled in front of a judge.

The actual outcome of bigger companies like Cloudflare, Facebook, etc... pushing more of their moderation decisions onto the government is that the government will be doing a lot more moderating, and governments tend to be pretty clumsy about that, and court systems tend to be slow (for good reason, they have safety precautions because prosecuting someone is serious business), and laws tend to be very reactive and either overbroad or out-of-date, and they don't tend to take into account niche communities with special needs.

But beyond all of that, the law is also just a harsh thing to fall afoul of.

I just don't understand how someone can say, "make it easier to prosecute people for speech" and treat that like the pro-speech position. Isn't it better when communities and industries can have lower-stakes moderation decisions that aren't going to end up with someone being thrown in prison or fined? "The government should handle moderation" is exactly how we end up with bills like SESTA/FOSTA.

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> Given that they should never be in this position

I also feel weird about this line. There are a lot of tech people who are fine with critical infrastructure being fully privatized, but draw a line at that infrastructure making its own decisions about moderation. If Cloudflare believes its services are de-facto public infrastructure, then why is Cloudflare a private company?

I feel like a lot of tech people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to have a private company to be able to throw its weight behind technical decisions and infrastructure decisions and to shape the entire market, but they don't want any responsibility that might go along with that. My take is that if you don't feel responsible enough to be in the position that you're in, then get out of that position.

More and more, I realize that there is a difference between choosing not to abuse power and putting yourself in a position where you can't abuse power. Cloudflare makes a lot of excuses about how scared it is of abusing power, but what is it actually doing to reduce the amount of power it has over the Internet? If Cloudflare is saying that it shouldn't be making decisions about which services can get free CDNs, then that is tacitly saying that its specific CDNs and DDOS protection services are so powerful that they're essential to the modern web. If they're so powerful that Cloudflare wants to be completely hands-off about access to these services -- well, that prompts the question, "is it good for that kind of power regardless of the speech implications to be in the hands of private companies?"

Because Cloudflare has the ability to shape a lot more than just speech, it is in a privileged position to make decisions about core Internet infrastructure, and if its owners genuinely believe that they're not capable of making those decisions, then the irresponsible decision here is not in how they exercise that power, the irresponsible part is them holding onto that power and continuing to expand their marketshare and centralize that power even though they don't think they (or anyone else) is fit to wield it.

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> Cloudflare is choosing between "platforming the bad guys" and "censoring free speech".

This point has gotten raised before by other people, but I just want to remind everyone that a nontrivial part of Cloudflare's business model is dedicated to censoring network requests. Cloudflare draws a line between "speech" and "abuse" every single time that it intercepts and blocks a DoS attack and every single time that it classifies IP ranges as dangerous or safe. It doesn't demand a court order in order to block clients from accessing a website if it thinks that those clients are contributing to a targeted attack. It doesn't rely on the government to tell it what is and isn't malicious web traffic.

A big part of the argument against Kiwi Farms was that the site wasn't just hateful or bigoted, it was actively abusing infrastructure and targeting individuals in the real world. I think compressing all of this down into a single "bad guys" category is oversimplifying the issue. I personally feel that Kiwi Farms has more in common with a malware or a DDOS-for-hire site than it does with a political site.

Of course, Cloudflare also provides services for multiple DoS-for-hire sites, and I have the same criticisms there. Is Cloudflare free-speech absolutist about this or not? Because if Cloudflare is arguing it has a moral duty to make sure that DoS sites stay online, then it's not immediately clear to me how it justifies its own business model. I honestly feel like there's a real lack of critical thought and real deliberation from Cloudflare recently about speech. I don't think the Kiwi Farms decision was a particularly complicated one, Cloudflare is a service that is in part dedicated to making it harder to knock people offline. That they don't seem to see any parallels between their services and their moderation decisions, and that they don't seem to realize that they are in fact in the business of censorship -- is concerning to me.

It feeds into the point above about why Cloudflare feels so comfortable being in charge of this much Internet traffic given its fears about censorship. Does Cloudflare not realize that it has a tremendous amount of power and is in fact directly shaping the kinds of expression and speech and services that people can build online regardless of what its moderation decisions are? Any company that's reaching the stage where they're scared about deplatforming a doxing site should be scared about a lot more of their powers than just moderation.