Is it truly "censorship" though, if one is so aggressively distasteful and difficult to deal with that nobody wants to do business with them?
Daily Stormer was taken down as a result of 0 court orders. If I'm on someone's platform and I either break their rules repeatedly or invite attacks on them, it's not exactly censorship if they get tired of putting up with my shit and remove me. VPS operators repeatedly warn me that if I invite frequent DDoS attacks, they will remove me from the service. They have a say in how their own platform operates.
White national socialists/identitarians sell themselves as the most censored people on the Internet as if they hold information just begging to be released and practiced. Only, there's no redeeming value to the content of their information; it ranges from callous disregard of people based on race, to the outright extermination of anyone who disagrees with the cause. All of these "beliefs" effectively incite people to attack them, regardless of how well you may articulate them. It's little different from me repeatedly challenging blackhats to disable my VPS.
The only thing they really succeed in doing, is being the Internet's biggest pain in the ass to do business with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with what Cloudflare did.
Removing something perfectly legal, because public opinion is against them is cowardly.
Being a company that advertises DDoS mitigation and then drops a customer, because they get attacked a lot, is a cop out.
Being a company that will argue that they are not responsible for what their customers post legally, while by contrast dropping customers based on their content is pretty much censorship.
Don't think for a minute that dropping Daily Stormer wasn't just about public opinion and turning bad PR into good PR.
Cloudflare didn't drop Daily Stormer because of public opinion, but because of claims by Daily Stormer that Cloudflare supported Daily Stormer:
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.[1]
Dropping them for that is 100% justified in my book.
Why couldn't have they made a public statement that they do not endorse the Daily Stormer, reasserted that Cloudflare's business is not political activism and warned them that future claims like this would lead to termination? After all, Cloudflare's CEO describes the act itself as "dangerous", as a one-time act that would never happen again(at least, until someone else does the same thing?), etc..
The CEO doesn't seem to agree with you on this being 100% justified:
> Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. … It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
(I was unable to source the claims that the Daily Stormer made about Cloudflare supporting them. I seem to remember the Daily Stormer denying they made those claims. It seems pretty important to know the actual catalyst for a major breach in company policy, but it doesn't seem to be reported anywhere I looked).
It can be, at least with regards to distasteful. “Difficult to work with” is clearly a perfectly acceptable reason to ditch a customer.
My reason for saying “can be” is that a few friends of mine are members of a fetish website which had to ban certain entirely legal (in the USA) content because all the (USA) payment providers found it too disgusting. (For extra irony, I think the entire premise of the site makes it illegal to view with images switched on in the UK where my friends are, but that presumably hasn’t had any effect on the payment providers or my friends might have mentioned it).
Daily Stormer was taken down as a result of 0 court orders. If I'm on someone's platform and I either break their rules repeatedly or invite attacks on them, it's not exactly censorship if they get tired of putting up with my shit and remove me. VPS operators repeatedly warn me that if I invite frequent DDoS attacks, they will remove me from the service. They have a say in how their own platform operates.
White national socialists/identitarians sell themselves as the most censored people on the Internet as if they hold information just begging to be released and practiced. Only, there's no redeeming value to the content of their information; it ranges from callous disregard of people based on race, to the outright extermination of anyone who disagrees with the cause. All of these "beliefs" effectively incite people to attack them, regardless of how well you may articulate them. It's little different from me repeatedly challenging blackhats to disable my VPS.
The only thing they really succeed in doing, is being the Internet's biggest pain in the ass to do business with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with what Cloudflare did.