Cloudflare is not a regulated provider of essential services / utilities. Right from their tos: "We may at our sole discretion suspend or terminate your access to the Websites and/or Online Services at any time, with or without notice for any reason or no reason at all." (and they have done so before)
So? Are you arguing that it is good for a company to have and wield this kind of power to attack other organizations that it believes are engaging in conduct they don't like?
Or has Kiwi Farms been shown in a court of law to have engaged in the behavior you describe?
Yes. At some point you've got to ask yourself if you're making the world a worse place with your decisions, even if everything is technically legal. And then decide if you want to change it or not.
You're basically arguing that it isn't just the right of large organizations to deplatform content to make the world a better place (which has no consistent definition). You're implying that they have the obligation to do this. This stance is very dangerous even to those who might benefit from it in the short term.
To a vanishing degree, most people agree that hosting a site that encourages vulnerable people to kill themselves (and each other) makes the world worse. That's the context here, not a site debating the merits of different dog breeds.
It is a broader consideration. It is easy to decide to stop servicing murderers, nazis, and other widely derided groups, especially on a one-off basis whenever objections are raised. It is another thing to actively investigate your customer base and police them. There are industries where this absolutely should happen. And there are others where we probably are better off with a laissez-faire approach (my local grocery is not a regulated utility, but I think they should still roughly operate that way - serve anyone who comes in the door). Cloudflare needs to have a clear TOS, and remove this site for violating it.
But we should still be cautious about how broad a TOS it might be, what evidence is required, what due-process and appeals are available. Every other day there is some post on HN saying "Big Service provider shut down my site overnight without warning!" but that is consequence anti-abuse systems policing customer activity and badly implemented systems are going to have negative consequences. The obvious cases make it seems easier than it actually is to build fair systems.
We learned this the hard way during the Civil Rights Movement: there needs to be some public participation in the restrictions that private businesses can place on their customer base.
Of course they don't. Look at all the objections to removing a forum explicitly created to encourage stalking and harassment of marginalized people, which has lead to multiple suicides by its targets.
Sometimes you have to move forward without 100% agreement and stop listening to trolls making slippery-slope arguments.
This is the flip side of https://xkcd.com/1357/ that so many people have been citing here. You want them to cancel the service of the person who says things you don't like, just because they're not legally prohibited from doing so.
