Technology

If you go back to [the] early days of Cloudflare, we've wrestled with: 'What is our role in term of controlling what content flows through our network?' And we believed that the right principle was to remain content neutral.

I think he’s exactly correct. This is what Net Neutrality is about. Service providers on the Internet should be treated like a utility. It’s easy to conflate this issue with that of ‘tolerating the intolerant,’ but I don’t think that’s correct at all. It’s also an argument that many parts of the Internet infrastructure have had. Cloudflare is a big part of the infrastructure underpinning the Internet at large, but it’s only a part. There are many others that need to come together to support a simple website. What about RIRs (Regional Internet Registries) like ARIN, who are responsible for allocating IP addresses? If you’re going to be upset with Cloudflare for struggling about whether or not to be neutral, why should they get off the hook? I think it’s probably because most people don’t understand how the Internet works, and so they remain ignorant of what goes into simply ‘hooking up’ a website to the Internet, allowing these other critically necessary components to fly under the radar of the public attention.

The debate about various Internet infrastructure entities remaining neutral has long raged. By and large, the communities that build and maintain these kinds of underpinnings have come down on the side of remaining neutral. It’s a vastly complex situation, with no easy answers, and a LOT of ‘hidden’ variables and concerns.