This is the second time Matthew Prince has crossed his own line. In August 2017 Cloudflare publicly defended a hands-off, content-neutral policy under pressure over Daily Stormer, then within a day dropped protection for the site anyway — an episode Prince described as a mistake he was reluctant to repeat. After the El Paso shooting, reports tied to the 8chan board used by the attacker, he repeated it, terminating service and calling the site "lawless."
The split response from the rest of the stack is what makes this story more than a rerun: 8chan quickly switched its domain registration to Epik in an attempt to stay online, while Tucows — its registrar at the time of the announcement — explicitly refused to follow Cloudflare's lead.
First-order effects
8chan loses the DDoS shielding that kept it reachable under attack, and within a day is struggling to stay up at all — the immediate effect of Cloudflare's exit is availability, not legality.
Tucows keeps the domain registered, meaning the site survives at the DNS layer even as its protective infrastructure disappears.
Second-order effects
Epik inherits the registrar role but its BitMitigate division refuses to provide DoS or CDN services, leaving 8chan with a registrar of last resort but no protector of last resort — every remaining vendor must now make its own content call.
The Daily Stormer template repeats: each high-profile termination pressures other infrastructure firms serving fringe sites like Gab.com and Daily Stormer to decide whether they are platforms or common carriers.
Third-order effects
Content moderation is migrating down the stack — from hosts to CDN, DDoS, and registrar layers — so a site's survival depends on stacking independent yes/no decisions across providers rather than any single regulator's ruling.
If ad hoc post-tragedy terminations keep substituting for settled policy, expect recurring cycles where providers reverse stated neutrality principles one client at a time, with no consistent rule for which sites lose service next.
The trend: Internet infrastructure providers are becoming de facto content arbiters, with each mass-shooting aftermath forcing another layer of the delivery stack to abandon content neutrality.
Thank you so much @CloudFlare. Finally this nightmare might have an end. I just want to go back to making my fonts in peace and not have to worry about getting phone calls from CNN/New York Times every time a mass shooting happens. They could have prevented this and chose not to.
Update: I talked to Cloudflare CEO @eastdakota, who said he is undecided about whether or not to allow 8chan to continue using its DDOS protection service (which effectively allows the site to stay online) https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@eastdakota There's a big, interesting debate here about which layers of the internet should be responsible for banning extreme content. Everyone (mostly) agrees ISPs like Comcast shouldn't. Everyone (mostly) agrees social networks like Facebook should. Cloudflare is somewhere in…
I see lots of people dunking on @cloudflare today without addressing the actual argument they make for keeping 8chan—that law enforcement asks them to keep such sites, because this gives them more visibility into them. Whatever you think of the argument, ignoring it is dishonest.…
Breaking: Cloudflare CEO @eastdakota tells me the company is cutting off 8chan's access to its DDOS protection service after all, a big reversal from earlier in the day. Story update TK.
@Cloudflare @eastdakota Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says that his decision is not about free speech or making money. Instead, he says keeping 8chan within Cloudflare's network facilitates monitoring of the site and cooperation with law enforcement. https://www.theguardian.com/ …
Cloudflare took the same step two years ago, banning the Daily Stormer after Charlottesville. Then, like now, the company agonized over the decision. “Today, the Daily Stormer is still available and still disgusting. They have bragged that they have more readers than ever.” https…
The weirdest thing I learned today? It's that the guy who now owns and runs 8chan, and manager of public policy at the internet's #3 accredited registrar, Tucows, are neighbours... in Philippines Make of it what you will: https://www.techmeme.com/... https://en.wikipedia.org/...
8chan creator: “thought 4chan had become too restrictive & wanted to create a place where all free speech, no matter how toxic, would be allowed.” Also 8chan creator: *oh no 8chan has turned into a haven for Nazis, HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN* https://www.nytimes.com/...
As several commenters have noted, Cloudflare is heading toward an IPO later this year. Not a great look to public investors if you're defending the go-to site for extremist shooter manifestos.
The terrorist who went on a killing spree in El Paso used a CloudFlare customer racist website to announce his attack. CloudFlare says protecting sites like that is a “moral obligation.” #NotTheOnion https://www.vice.com/...
@eastdakota Matthew is a thoughtful CEO (he wrote this after banning the Daily Stormer post-Charlottesville: https://t.co/...) and his is not the normal free speech argument. He's arguing, basically, that an evil site law enforcement can monitor is better than one it can't.
“Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based firm that helps web companies defend against cyberattacks, has continued to work with 8chan, saying it serves websites regardless of their content.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Cloudfare is not going to drop its support of 8chan despite this being the third time an attacker has posted a manifesto to the site, @juliacarriew reports. (Without Cloudflare, vigilantes would probably DDoS 8chan into oblivion.) https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
@Cloudflare Let me be a little less oblique. There are many people who work at @cloudflare besides the CEO. If you can persuade that group to take 8chan down, they will do it, and the CEO can't gainsay it. So engaging that group on terms other than “your company is evil” has some…
Here's my story on 8chan's links to El Paso, Poway and Christchurch, including an interview with @Cloudflare CEO @eastdakota about why he considers keeping the site in Cloudflare's network a “moral obligation” https://www.theguardian.com/ ...
He talked to WSJ about this back in March. Interesting how technology & social media creators keep turning on their very own creations. https://www.wsj.com/... https://twitter.com/...
“Shut the site down,” Brennan said. “It's not doing the world any good. It's a complete negative to everybody except the users that are there. And you know what? It's a negative to them, too. They just don't realize it.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
I talked to the founder and former admin of 8chan this morning. He told me he wants the site to be shut down, after being involved in 3 mass shootings this year. https://www.nytimes.com/...