> if this is about not-illegal-but-objectionable content, I'm actually glad that as an infrastructure company, they're choosing to not get into the business of content moderation.
Agreed. There's one other subset you didn't mention: "Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law". Cloudflare again has a pretty hardline stance that "the courts need to come to us and force us to take it down"
It's not reasonable. 99% of scams, frauds and harassment will never be subject of legal action, because there just aren't enough prosecutors out there to charge every fraud attempt.
If you require a court ruling before blocking a fraud, it means you will keep hosting 99% of frauds.
If it's clearly illegal, what prevents it from being handled in any court of law? If it's not actually as clear, preemptive/overzealous compliance can lead to all kinds of undesirable (in a liberal democracy) effects.
I also doubt that Cloudflare lets every single analogous issue bubble up to a full court case every single time, but for new/unclear/borderline scenarios, I'm glad that courts don't get to outsource their duty, i.e. determining the legality of actions, to a for-profit organization without public oversight.
Maybe that commentator lives in a country without common law, so precedent doesn't matter, but in a country like the US a law without precedent is considered "untried" and a lot of the details are worked out when the law is first enforced.
If the legislature doesn't like the court's interpretation, they can then amend the law and the process restarts.
So basically, at least in the US, nothing is clearly illegal until it is handled by a court -- so yes I think you're right
Agreed. There's one other subset you didn't mention: "Clearly illegal but not yet handled in the court of law". Cloudflare again has a pretty hardline stance that "the courts need to come to us and force us to take it down"