Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says firm has stopped protecting Daily Stormer from DDoS attacks, explains his discomfort with policy reversal in email to staff
Internet companies typically take a hands-off approach to offensive content on their networks, erring on the side of maintaining an open internet.
Context & Ripple Effects
The reversal comes one day after Cloudflare publicly defended its content-neutral stance under fire for continuing to service Daily Stormer (defending its hands-off policy). What changed is not just the decision but the framing: Matthew Prince is now explaining his own discomfort with breaking that principle to staff, a rare admission that the company's neutrality doctrine cracked under pressure rather than evolved by design.
The episode matters because it sits at the boundary between user-facing platforms, which routinely moderate, and infrastructure companies like Cloudflare, which had claimed immunity from those judgments. The Wired retrospective on the boot (the internal struggle over the decision) shows how much strain the Daily Stormer call put on that distinction.
First-order effects
- Daily Stormer immediately loses its DDoS shield, leaving the site exposed to the attacks Cloudflare was absorbing, while Prince has to sell a policy U-turn to his own employees as a one-off rather than a new rule.
Second-order effects
- The move creates a precedent other infrastructure providers can be pressured to follow — and Cloudflare itself did follow it, when Prince later terminated service to 8chan on the grounds that its lawlessness caused deaths (the 8chan termination).
Third-order effects
- If case-by-case terminations become the pattern, the line between neutral infrastructure and accountable platform erodes, forcing companies like Cloudflare into ad hoc content-moderation decisions without clear rules — exactly the gap the later debate over how platforms, infrastructure firms, and governments should divide moderation responsibility tried to address.
The trend: Internet infrastructure providers are being pulled from content-neutral operation toward discretionary, case-by-case moderation decisions, with each high-profile termination narrowing the claim that pipes are exempt from content judgments.