Cloudflare CEO fighting for free speech
In August, Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer, a right-wing neo-Nazi site.
This is a decision CEO Matthew Prince now regrets.
Cloudflare stopped proxying Daily Stormer’s traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for its sites, and said it reserved the right to terminate users of their network at their sole discretion.
“The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology,” said Cloudflare.
Prince said he hated the decision, and he hopes to never repeat it again.
The CEO – an “almost free-speech absolutist” – said they did not have much choice at the time.
They faced pressure from clients, with threats they will cancel their services unless Cloudflare took action.
“We reached out to various civil libertarian organisations and said we need some air cover here. People said we’d rather not stick our necks out on this issue,” he said.
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