Cloudflare is one of the CDN providers popular among websites on the internet.
Its products rely on its networks that act as an intermediary layer between a website and all of its traffic, including normal visitors, crawlers and bots. Based in San Francisco, CloudFlare operates more than 100 data centers across the world, serving as a sort of middleman for websites, protecting them from attacks.
As anyone can use its services, many from the goods and the bads are also using it. That include hate websites dedicated to recruiting, organizing and spreading ISIS and extremists' ideologies, websites that promote racial hatred, Holocaust denial and more.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince has written that service providers do not have "an affirmative obligation to monitor and make determinations about" the content of sites on its network. But since its launch in 2013, CloudFlare has quickly become the go-to spot for racists on the internet.
CloudFlare's top data centers that cache those contents include those in Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Romania, Ireland, Finland, Great Britain, France, Norway, Russia, Sweden, Czech Republic, Austria, Poland and Portugal .
CloudFlare has commitment to free speech. In response to those accusations, Matthew Prince wrote, "One of the greatest strengths of the United States is a belief that speech, particularly political speech, is sacred. A website, of course, is nothing but speech. … It is not a bomb."
Prince said that CloudFlare is happy to cooperate with the government if they come to its San Francisco-based office about one of its customers by having all the proper legal documentation to take down a site.
"I think we have a responsibility to comply with U.S. law and the law of any of the countries in which we operate," Prince said. "When we have a customer who we think might be engaged in an illegal act, we consult with law enforcement organizations. … We comply with legal orders."
But more often than not, investigators want him to keep websites on CloudFlare running rather than take them down.
"Even if we were hosting sites for ISIS, it wouldn't be of any use to us," he continued. "I should imagine those kinds of people pay with stolen credit cards and so that's a negative for us."
He said that it isn't CloudFlare's philosophy to just take down websites because management and the people don't agree with the content. Some hosting companies have that control and are strict about what can be served on their networks, but CloudFlare isn't having that policy.