Cloudflare: A Questionable Approach
In a world where fast data transfer is now essential for businesses, CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) have become indispensable, and most of the world’s traffic goes through these services, which speed up content delivery for faster website loading and minimal latency. CDNs also protect sites to a certain extent, notably against DDoS attacks.
In this two-part article, we will first look at Cloudflare and its philosophy, before turning to the importance of its role in piracy.
A multidimensional company
Cloudflare, founded in 2007, is the market leader in CDNs, but that may not be why you know the company.
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Indeed, the data show every year that about 80% of the traffic to the top 250 pirate sites is routed through Cloudflare.
The company is well known for allowing pirate sites, and even terrorist sites, to use its services, and its services notably make it possible to mask IP addresses.
Cloudflare posted revenue of US$212 million in the first quarter of 2022, and part of that revenue comes from these illicit sites that violate the first clause of Cloudflare’s terms of use, which states that, by agreeing to the terms, customers represent and warrant that their use of the websites and online services complies with all applicable laws and regulations.
And yet every rights holder who has tried to have a site that infringes their intellectual property shut down knows that Cloudflare (almost) never shuts down the offending sites.
The company has been accused many times of facilitating piracy and earning good revenue from it. Cloudflare has also been at the centre of social controversies that help shed light on its philosophy.
It is, indeed, legitimate to ask whether intermediaries such as Cloudflare should be held responsible for the statements made and the content hosted on the sites that use their services.
Enabler of piracy, terrorism and online harassment, or defender of free speech?
The company’s policy, then, is not to respond to takedown notices or to provide information about its customers.
Cloudflare has nevertheless been led to remove several sites in recent years: the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer in 2017, then the infamous offshoot of QAnon and 4chan, 8chan in 2019. They have admitted several times to being uncomfortable with that decision, because they see themselves as a public utility of the internet and do not feel responsible for the actions of their customers. They compare their company to a telephone service: just because customers make racist or insulting remarks during a phone call does not mean their lines are cut. They therefore believe they can, and even must, behave in the same way, and refuse to act as a kind of internet police.
In September 2022, a new case made headlines: the streamer, Canadian communist candidate and transgender rights activist Clara Sorrenti was harassed by the forum KiwiFarms, which The Guardian called “the worst place on the web.” The site, a successor to 8chan whose openly stated purpose is to harass internet personalities (mainly women, both cis and trans), among other things revealed her home address and then that of the hotel where she had gone to take refuge after that disclosure. Forced to flee to Ireland, Sorrenti was threatened there, once again after her new address was revealed on the forum. The site is also responsible for her arrest by the Canadian authorities, having used the young woman’s identity to make false threats in which it appeared that she was about to carry out a mass shooting.
At first Cloudflare refused to shut down the site, regretting the flood of requests it had received after the shutdown of 8chan and the Daily Stormer. However, after what Cloudflare spokesperson Matthew Prince considered to be an imminent threat to Sorrenti’s life, Cloudflare was obliged to comply.
Security for pirates
The removal of the sites mentioned created what they consider a “dangerous precedent,” making it hard for them to refuse increasingly frequent requests to take a number of sites offline – activists and copyright holders were the first, but many authoritarian regimes, which were trying to have human rights sites taken offline in their respective countries, followed.
At first glance, all of this has nothing to do with piracy. However, these various cases clearly show the position the intermediary is trying to adopt – that of perfect neutrality, which allows everyone to speak and to have their content protected. These are precisely the justifications the company uses when it is faced with takedown notices from the various rights holders.
Company officials have also stated several times that they do not significantly contribute to copyright infringement, even though the vast majority of pirate sites use Cloudflare’s services, which puts them almost out of reach of takedown notices.
However, the way it handled the cases above clearly shows that in certain situations, Cloudflare resolves to stop providing its services to the offending sites. Would it be conceivable for the company to take responsibility in the area of intellectual property and, eventually, begin to cooperate with the authorities and rights holders?
In our next article in mid-November, we will see to what extent this philosophy makes the company an enabler of piracy, and the recent rulings against Cloudflare in 2022.
In the meantime, if your content needs to be protected, don’t hesitate to contact us, and we will be happy to help.
