Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince at a 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt conference in London. (credit: Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for TechCrunch)
"One of the greatest strengths of the United States is a belief that speech, particularly political speech, is sacred," wrote Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in a 2013 blog post. Both then and now, the CDN and Web security company has protected websites from denial-of-service attacks that aim to drown out targets with fake traffic. Prince vowed that this service would be available to anyone who wanted it.
"There will be things on our network that make us uncomfortable," Prince wrote. But "we will continue to abide by the law, serve all customers, and hold consistently to a belief that our proper role is not that of Internet censor."
Recently, this stance put Prince in a really uncomfortable position. Cloudflare was providing service to the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website that published an article trashing Heather Heyer, a victim of lethal violence during the Charlottesville protests. So under pressure from anti-racism activists, Cloudflare dropped the hate site as a customer. The move caused Daily Stormer to go down for more than 24 hours.
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