Earlier today, Cloudflare terminated the account of the Daily Stormer. We've stopped proxying their traffic and stopped answering DNS requests for their sites. We've taken measures to ensure that they cannot sign up for Cloudflare's services ever again.

Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.

Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare.

Now, having made that decision, let me explain why it's so dangerous.

Where Do You Regulate Content on the Internet?

There are a number of different organizations that work in concert to bring you the Internet. They include:

Content creators, who author the actual content online.

Platforms (e.g., Facebook, Wordpress, etc.), where the content is published.

Hosts (e.g., Amazon Web Services, Dreamhost, etc.), that provide infrastructure on which the platforms live.

Transit Providers (e.g., Level(3), NTT, etc.), that connect the hosts to the rest of the Internet.

Reverse Proxies/CDNs (e.g., Akamai, Cloudflare, etc.), that provide networks to ensure content loads fast and is protected from attack.

Authoritative DNS Providers (e.g., Dyn, Cloudflare, etc.), that resolve the domains of sites.

Registrars (e.g., GoDaddy, Tucows, etc.), that register the domains of sites.

Registries (e.g., Verisign, Afilias, etc.), that run the top level domains like .com, .org, etc.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) (e.g., Comcast, AT&T, etc.), that connect content consumers to the Internet.

Recursive DNS Providers (e.g., OpenDNS, Google, etc.), that resolve content consumers' DNS queries.

Browsers (e.g., Firefox, Chrome, etc.), that parse and organize Internet content into a consumable form.

There are other players in the ecosystem, including:

Search engines (e.g., Google, Bing, etc.), that help you discover content.

ICANN, the organization that sets the rules for the Registrars and Registries.

RIRs (e.g., ARIN, RIPE, APNIC, etc.), which provide the IP addresses used by Internet infrastructure.

Any of the above could regulate content online. The question is: which of them should?

Vigilante Justice

The rules and responsibilities for each of the organizations above in regulating content are and should be different. We've argued that it doesn't make sense to regulate content at the proxy, where Cloudflare provides service, since if we terminate a user the content won't go away it will just be slower and more vulnerable to attack.

That's true, and made sense for a long time, but increasingly may not be relevant. The size and scale of the attacks that can now easily be launched online make it such that if you don't have a network like Cloudflare in front of your content, and you upset anyone, you will be knocked offline. In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: "Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet."

You, like me, may believe that the Daily Stormer's site is vile. You may believe it should be restricted. You may think the authors of the site should be prosecuted. Reasonable people can and do believe all those things. But having the mechanism of content control be vigilante hackers launching DDoS attacks subverts any rational concept of justice.

Increasing Dependence On A Few Giant Networks

In a not-so-distant future, if we're not there already, it may be that if you're going to put content on the Internet you'll need to use a company with a giant network like Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Alibaba.

For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10% of Internet requests.

Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.

Freedom of Speech < Due Process

The issue of who can and cannot be online has often been associated with Freedom of Speech. We think the more important principle is Due Process. I, personally, believe in strong Freedom of Speech protections, but I also acknowledge that it is a very American idea that is not shared globally. On the other hand, the concept of Due Process is close to universal. At its most basic, Due Process means that you should be able to know the rules a system will follow if you participate in that system.

Due Process requires that decisions be public and not arbitrary. It's why we've always said that our policy is to follow the guidance of the law in the jurisdictions in which we operate. Law enforcement, legislators, and courts have the political legitimacy and predictability to make decisions on what content should be restricted. Companies should not.

What We Would Not Do

Beginning in 2013, Cloudflare began publishing our semi-annual Transparency Report. At the time we choose to include four statements of things that we had never done. They included:

Cloudflare has never turned over our SSL keys or our customers' SSL keys to anyone.

Cloudflare has never installed any law enforcement software or equipment anywhere on our network.

Cloudflare has never terminated a customer or taken down content due to political pressure.

Cloudflare has never provided any law enforcement organization a feed of our customers' content transiting our network.

We included them as "warrant canaries" because we thought they could help us push back against the request that governments may try to force us to make. That’s worked and all four of the warrant canaries have survived in every transparency report since 2013.

We're going to have a long debate internally about whether we need to remove the bullet about not terminating a customer due to political pressure. It's powerful to be able to say you've never done something. And, after today, make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don't like.

Establishing a Framework

Someone on our team asked after I announced we were going to terminate the Daily Stormer: "Is this the day the Internet dies?" He was half joking, but only half. He's no fan of the Daily Stormer or sites like it. But he does realize the risks of a company like Cloudflare getting into content policing.

There's a saying in legal circles that hard cases make bad law. We need to be careful of that here. What I do hope is it will allow us all to discuss what the framework for all of the organizations listed above should be when it comes to content restrictions. I don't know the right answer, but I do know that as we work it out it's critical we be clear, transparent, consistent and respectful of Due Process.</s>Another important tech company has cut ties with neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.

Internet firm Cloudflare said Wednesday it has terminated The Daily Stormer's account, which means it won't protect the site from cyberattacks that could cause it to go down.

The Daily Stormer site has already been dumped by the web-hosting services of GoDaddy (GDDY) and Google (GOOGL) this week after it published a derogatory story about Heather Heyer, who was killed while protesting against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday.

Cutting off The Daily Stormer is a big deal for Cloudflare, which had long resisted calls to do so. The company had insisted it remained neutral about the content on the sites that used its services.

But Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in a blog post that claims that the tech company secretly supported The Daily Stormer were the last straw.

"Like a lot of people, we've felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network," he said. "We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare."

Related: Should web-hosting companies restrict who's on their platforms?

The company's decision leaves The Daily Stormer vulnerable to DDoS attacks -- attempts to flood a website with so much traffic that it impairs normal service.

As well as GoDaddy and Google's moves to cut off The Daily Stormer site, Facebook (FB) has deleted links to the article attacking Heyer.

The Daily Stormer moved to a Russian domain on Wednesday but was no longer accessible there later in the day. RU-CENTER, the company that provided the Russian registration, said it suspended it because of concerns over the site's extremist content.

The site has been forced into the "dark web," which means it can't be accessed through standard web browsers.

The tech industry's shunning of The Daily Stormer has sparked debate over what role companies should play in policing online content. Experts say it's within businesses' rights to restrict who uses their products.

Terminating The Daily Stormer was a decision Cloudflare did not take lightly.

"After today, make no mistake, it will be a little bit harder for us to argue against a government somewhere pressuring us into taking down a site they don't like," Prince wrote.

He said he hoped The Daily Stormer case would spur a bigger discussion among internet companies about what the framework should be for restricting content.</s>Domain hosting company GoDaddy said Monday that neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer has 24 hours to find a new provider before its service is canceled following the publication of a disparaging article about the woman killed in the Charlottesville protests.

Shortly after the announcement, the Daily Stormer — the top hate site in America, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center — moved its domain to Google.

But in a matter of hours, Google announced it, too, would not be hosting the website.

On Sunday, the Daily Stormer published an article about Heather Heyer, who died after a vehicle plowed into a group of counter-protesters demonstrating against white supremacists.

A Twitter user flagged the offensive content by taking a screengrab of the article, and tweeting it at GoDaddy.

The article, which had the byline of the Daily Stormer's founder Andrew Anglin, mocked Heyer’s looks and degraded her for not being a mother.

It also elevated the suspected driver, James Alex Fields, Jr., saying, “despite the cool demeanor he shows in his social media profile pictures, it appears that road rage got the best of him.”

“We have informed the Daily Stormer that they have 24 hours to move the domain to another provider, as they have violated our terms of service. If no action is taken after 24 hours, we will cancel the service,” GoDaddy spokesman Dan Race wrote in an email to NBC News.

Race also noted that GoDaddy does not host the Daily Stormer on its servers — it only hosts the domain.

The Daily Stormer, which takes its name from the gutter Nazi propaganda sheet known as “Der Stürmer,” promotes anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In the past, GoDaddy said it could not disable the Daily Stormer’s domain or that of other neo-Nazi website, because of Anglin and others’ First Amendment right and freedom of speech.

“Given their latest article comes on the immediate heels of a violent act, we believe this type of article could incite additional violence, which violates our terms of service,” Race said.

By Monday afternoon, Google had decided to drop the Daily Stormer's domain registration, too.

“We are cancelling Daily Stormer’s registration with Google Domains for violating our terms of service,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email to NBC News.

A search for the domain showed Google was still hosting Daily Stormer as of 3 p.m. Monday. It was not immediately clear when Google would drop the site.

Following the article about Heyer and the announcement that GoDaddy would be ending the Daily Stormer’s service, the site appeared to have been hacked by internet activist group Anonymous.

Related: Sessions Says Dept. of Justice Will Defend Protesters Against ‘Racism and Bigotry’

An article with Anonymous’ signature Guy Fawkes mask appeared at the top of the page on Monday morning with a headline reading, “END OF HATE: ANONYMOUS NOW IN CONTROL OF DAILY STORMER.”

However, an Anonymous Twitter account noted that it could not verify the authenticity of the hack and warned its followers to “remain cautious.”

Later on Monday, a story on the Daily Stormer with Anglin's byline on it said the site was back in the hands of its founder.</s>Twitter and Cloudflare have followed in the footsteps of fellow internet titans GoDaddy, Google and Facebook by taking action against the Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website that’s been all but driven offline after mocking the woman killed while protesting a white nationalist rally this weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.

A Twitter account used to provide updates on behalf of the Daily Stormer, @rudhum, was abruptly suspended Wednesday as the infamous neo-Nazi website continues to face blowback over a recent tirade targeting Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman who was fatally run over by a car Saturday while counterprotesting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville.

“The Twitter Rules prohibit violent threats, harassment, hateful conduct and multiple account abuse, and we will take action on accounts violating those policies,” a company spokesperson said broadly with respect to the suspension, while declining to comment on individual accounts.

Cloudflare, a tech firm hired by The Daily Stormer to protect its websites from distributed denial-of-service attacks, a tactic used to knock sites offline, terminated its contract Wednesday, Andrew Auernheimer, an administrator of the website, told The Washington Times.

The DDoS protection firm’s CEO acknowledged dropping The Daily Stormer as a client in an interview with The Verge later Wednesday.

“This was my decision, I don’t think it’s CloudFlare’s policy and I think it’s an extremely dangerous decision in a lot of ways,” said CEO Matthew Prince. “I think that we as the internet need to have a conversation about where the right place for content restriction is … but there was no way we could have that conversation until we resolved this particular issue.”

The Daily Stormer has struggled to maintain an accessible internet presence after its publisher, Andrew Anglin, penned an article Saturday describing Heyer as an “overweight slob” and “the definition of uselessness.” GoDaddy and then Google responded one after another by booting The Daily Stormer from its domain registration services. The racist website has since tried hopping to at least two other domains — dailystormer.wang and dailystormer.ru — in a bid to stay online.

Facebook has begun deleting posts linking to Mr. Anglin’s article and has banned the pages of at least 10 groups this week accused of violating the social network’s policies against hate speech, a spokesperson told The Washington Times on Wednesday.

“The CloudFlare betrayal adds another layer of super complexity,” Mr. Anglin responded online. “But we got this.”

Neither of The Daily Stormer’s two latest domains nor a mirrored version of the website hosted on the deep web could be immediately accessed Wednesday afternoon.

Mr. Auernheimer referred The Times to public accounts he and Mr. Anglin each maintain on Gab.ai, an alternative social network, as well as The Daily Stormer’s presence on VK, a Facebook alternative popular in Russia, when reached for comment.</s>NEW YORK CITY (JTA) –GoDaddy, the world’s largest domain name seller, will no longer provide service to the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer.

In response to a tweet Sunday, Aug. 13, about a Daily Stormer article that smeared Heather Heyer — the 32-year-old killed in the car ramming during Saturday’s protests in Charlottesville, Virginia — as a “fat” and “childless” “slut,” the company said The Daily Stormer had violated its terms of service.

A GoDaddy representative confirmed the action to The Arizona Republic.

According to the Huffington Post, The Daily Stormer had been using GoDaddy since 2013. The Southern Povery Law Center describes The Daily Stormer as dedicated to “spreading anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism and white nationalism.”</s>Russia's media watchdog said Thursday it "requested" that a Russian internet provider boot The Daily Stormer off its website because the American group spews neo-Nazi propaganda and incites racial and national hatred.

The Daily Stormer had briefly taken refuge at the Ru-center, which provided the Russian domain, after being kicked off American servers by GoDaddy and Google following the uproar over Charlottesville white nationalist demonstrations.

Even before the Russian watchdog officially stepped in, the neo-Nazi website had been forced to retreat temporarily to the dark Web when security firm Cloudflare severed ties with the site Wednesday.

Officially, Roskomnadzor, the watchdog organization, can only shutdown websites on charges of extremism after approval from Russia’s General Prosecutor’s Office, The Moscow Times reported, but its "request" carries considerable weight.

More: Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer rebuffed by Russia, China

More: Twitter boots The Daily Stormer in latest eviction for neo-Nazi site

More: Neo-Nazi website 'The Daily Stormer' still up after GoDaddy, Google rejections

The original U.S. domain — www.dailystormer.com — was discontinued Monday. The site's owners then attempted to register a domain in both China and Russia. The Chinese domain, www.dailystormer.wang, and the url from Russia, www.dailystormer.ru, were shut down just hours after being created.

The site now can only be accessed on the dark Web with a free anonymizing browser such as Tor. Content on the dark Web is not indexed by popular search engines such as Google.

Alexander Zharov, head of the Russian watchdog organization Roskomnadzor, told the Interfax news agency the watchdog had “asked” the Ru-center to stop servicing the website.

GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving, explaining why it rejected the site, told CNBC that there is a "very fine line between making sure we're not being a censor and making sure we're acting in a responsible manner."

"But when the line gets crossed and that speech starts to incite violence then we have a responsibility to take that down," Irving said.

GoDaddy took action after the website verbally attacked Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old legal assistant who was run down and killed during the Charlottesville demonstrations.

The neo-Nazi website called her "fat" and "childless" and said "most people are glad she is dead, as she is the definition of uselessness."

After GoDaddy and Google booted the site, other tech companies providing services to The Daily Stormer followed suit.

Zoho, which provided email services to the website, and Sendgrid, an email marketing company, both said they would no longer serve The Daily Stormer. Both Discord and Discourse, companies that run open-source chatrooms used by Daily Stormer users, said on Twitter they had kicked the site off, too.

Tech companies' rejection of any association with The Daily Stormer, which published articles grouped under headings such as "Jewish Problem" and "Race War," and gave followers detailed instructions on what items to bring to Charlottesville, represents a stronger response from the industry on domestic hate groups.

Any removal from the public eye may be be short-lived. As soon as The Daily Stormer gets kicked off one platform, its founders seem to find another or build their own. They have an incentive: while operating on the dark Web offers a way to operate without the nod from a domain registration company such as Google, it won't be available to as many readers as possible.

"They don't want to hide, they want to recruit," said Linda Woolf, a psychology professor at Webster University in Missouri studying hate groups online. "They'll do whatever they can to reach people."</s>Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has found a home on the Russian internet after American tech companies refused to host it.

GoDaddy (GDDY) canceled the website's registration on Monday after The Daily Stormer published a derogatory story about Heather Heyer, who was killed while protesting against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia at the weekend.

Google (GOOGL, Tech30) briefly became the registrar for the site, before it too canceled the site's registration later on Monday for violating its terms of service.

The site, which calls itself "The World's Most Genocidal Republican Website," was forced into the "dark web." That meant it could not be accessed through standard web browsers.

The original website, Dailystormer.com, was still offline on Wednesday afternoon. But the site could be accessed at Dailystormer.ru after the domain was registered with the Russian Network Information Center, or RU-CENTER.

Russia's largest domain name registrar confirmed it had registered the site.

"I should point out that registry is automatic, so RU-CENTER registers thousands of domains per day," spokesperson Egor Timofeev said in a statement emailed to CNNMoney.

"If we figure out that the domain owner's work doesn't correspond to the legal system, we will act according to Russian web standard regulation," he added.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, says the site spreads "anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism, primarily through guttural hyperbole and epithet-laden stories about topics like alleged Jewish world control and black-on-white crime."

Related: Should web-hosting companies restrict who's on their platforms?

Russia has recently dialed up its censorship of the internet.

The government's media and telecommunication watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has blocked thousands of websites and maintains a long list of banned content.

The list includes websites taken down because of data protection concerns and laws prohibiting the distribution of "gay propaganda", as well as political content the government deems "extremist."

Roskomnadzor did not respond to CNNMoney's request for comment.</s>When the Daily Stormer lost control of its .com domain in the face of a social media protest, the infamous hate site sought virtual refuge in Russia. For a few hours on Wednesday, the site re-appeared at the domain "dailystormer.ru" before the site lost DDoS protection from CloudFlare and disappeared from the Web once again.

Now the Russians have nixed the Daily Stormer's new online home, citing the country's laws against hate speech. According to Radio Free Europe, the Russian company responsible for registering the Daily Stormer's Russian domain received a letter from Russian authorities asking it "to look into the possibility of register suspension due to extremist content of this domain. So we decided to suspend [the] domain Dailystormer.ru."

"Russian law has established a very strict regime for combatting any kind of extremism in the Internet," said Aleksandr Zharov, head of the Roskomnadzor, the Russian government agency responsible for media and Internet regulation.

Zharov told Radio Free Europe that the Daily Stormer "propagates neo-Nazi ideology and stirs up racial, national, and other forms of social discord," in likely violation of Russian hate speech laws.

The current controversy began when Daily Stormer editor Andrew Anglin wrote a vulgar post attacking Heather Heyer, who was killed in this weekend's Charlottesville car attack. Social media activists convinced GoDaddy to blacklist the site, and when the site transferred its domain to Google's domain service, Google blacklisted the site as well. Since then, the site hasn't been able to find another .com registrar willing to work with it.

But Anglin isn't giving up. "We're going to be up on the Darkweb soon," he wrote in a Thursday morning post on the right-wing Twitter competitor Gab.</s>Cloudflare has become the latest company to drop the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer in the wake of a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a protester was killed.

The San Francisco, Calif.-based networking and website protection company's chief executive Matthew Prince said in an email that he personally made the decision.

"I don't think it's CloudFlare's policy and I think it's an extremely dangerous decision in a lot of ways," said Prince in the email, seen by The Verge. (We reached out to Cloudflare and several executives prior to publication but did not hear back.)

Prince said that he "pulled the plug" on the Daily Stormer after one its readers suggested that Cloudflare supported the site's neo-Nazi and racist ideologies by providing service.

The news was first reported on Twitter after a message from the website's founder Andrew Auernheimer, known as Weev, was leaked.

The website has faced difficulty in finding web hosting after its domain provider GoDaddy dropped the site for violating its terms of service. After Google also canceled the site's service later in the day, the site later took to the dark web, which can only be accessed through the Tor anonymity network.

Sister-site CNET reported this week that Reddit, Facebook, and gaming chat program Discord have in the past day all banned communication tools on their respective services.

Twitter also suspended several accounts on Wednesday associated with the neo-Nazi website.

It comes days after a weekend of violence in the Virginia town where the site had been involved in organizing a white supremacist rally. Heather Heyer, 32, was killed and dozens were injured when James Fields, 20, who attended the rally, plowed a car into a crowd of protesters on Saturday.

But Cloudflare's decision comes in the face of criticism towards the company, after it had initially declined to pull its services offering protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks.

The company, which doesn't host content but provides the networking support and attack protection, had described the content on sites like the Daily Stormer as "repugnant," but would not call out the site directly.

Cloudflare has long taken an absolutist approach to free speech, allowing what Prince called "horrible people" to use the company's services.

"If you have companies making moral judgments on what's good and bad, that worries me a lot," said Prince in an interview with ZDNet in 2015.

He added: "If a final court order comes down and says we can't do something -- governments have tanks and guns."

He said in the interview that he didn't "ever want to be in the position" where the company should have to decide between "good content and bad content," he said. "If a court comes and says you can't provide service to someone, we'll do everything we can within the law to challenge the order."</s>Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer has been booted from the Russian internet.

The country's media watchdog asked for it to be taken down because of extremist content.

"The Daily Stormer website promotes neo-Nazi ideology, incites racial, national and other types of social discord," Roskomnadzor said in a statement on Thursday.

American tech companies had canceled the site's registration earlier this week after it published a derogatory story about Heather Heyer, who was killed while protesting against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

It surfaced briefly again on Wednesday when the Russian Network Information Center (RU-CENTER) registered the domain Dailystormer.ru.

"I should point out that registry is automatic, so RU-CENTER registers thousands of domains per day," spokesperson Egor Timofeev told CNNMoney on Wednesday.

RU-CENTER said Thursday it had canceled the registration following Roskomnadzor's official request.

If it's unable to find a new domain registrar willing to provide its services, The Daily Stormer will be forced into the "dark web." That means it can't be accessed through standard web browsers.

Seperately, U.S. internet company Cloudflare said it would no longer protect the neo-Nazi site from cyberattacks.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, says site spreads "anti-Semitism, neo-Nazism, and white nationalism, primarily through guttural hyperbole and epithet-laden stories about topics like alleged Jewish world control and black-on-white crime."

Related: Should web-hosting companies restrict who's on their platforms?

Russia has recently dialed up its censorship of the internet.

Roskomnadzor has blocked thousands of websites and maintains a long list of banned content.

The list includes websites taken down because of data protection concerns and laws prohibiting the distribution of "gay propaganda," as well as political content the government deems "extremist."
Internet firm CloudFlare ceased CDN support for the neo-Nazi, white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, after The Daily Stormer claimed that the company supported their cause. The Daily Stormer website had already lost web-hosting services by the domain register GoDaddy and Google (Cloudflare's Official Blog) (CNN Money)