This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 15th,

2022. I'm Caleb Brown.

Cloud Flair provides services to protect websites from attack and their customers, as you might

imagine, include many disfavored websites that lots of those on the internet want to

attack. So what does it mean that Cloudflare has decided to stop protecting the home of many internet trolls,

Kiwi Farms. Cato's Will Duffield and Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason comment.

Will you and I had just recorded a podcast talking about Cloudflare and their decision to continue to provide services to people that most people would find sort of abhorrent at least in a sense in sort of their activities that they conduct online and as soon as we had recorded they decided no we going to change our position on this.

So just for people who are unfamiliar with Cloudflare and how companies like this operate

on the internet set the stage for us a little bit in terms of what has happened

over the last couple of months and who this company is and who they provide services for.

Cloudflare is a content delivery network and D-D-D-D-S protection firm that helps websites to stay online.

And over the past month, they became the focal point of efforts to remove a troll forum called

Kiwi Farms from the internet.

They maintain their silence for a while. They then published a document outlining why they felt they shouldn't engage in content moderation, at least for their content delivery services.

It differentiated between hosting a website

and the sorts of protection from D-D-D-D-Sattax

that Cloudflare offered. But after publishing this document on Wednesday, on

Saturday, Cloudflare in a sort of about face decided to remove services from Kiwi farms and since then the site has been knocked off line and in an attempt to keep it offline, critics of the site have run even

deeper into the internet stack, getting one of their domains seized in Iceland, and even prompting Google

to remove the Google Voice account used by the forum's administrator.

All right, so Liz, there, Cloudflare draws a distinction between hosting content and providing

services to keep that kind of site online.

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