Cloudflare CEO says his Daily Stormer takedown was “arbitrary” and “dangerous”

Until recently, Cloudflare prided itself on its unwavering commitment to free speech. Even when he was criticized for providing service to alleged terrorist groups in 2013, CEO Matthew Prince stood firm, insisting that "a website is speech. It is not a bomb."

So a lot of people were surprised on Wednesday when the company abruptly changed its tune and canceled the account of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. The action seemed to fly in the face of everything Cloudflare claimed to believe as recently as May.

And in an internal company e-mail obtained by Gizmodo, Prince acknowledged that the decision was exactly as arbitrary as it seemed.

"My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I'd had enough," Prince wrote. "Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision."

Prince wrote that he "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."

In the same e-mail, Prince argued that it is "dangerous" for that kind of power to be concentrated in any one person's hands.

"It's important that what we did today not set a precedent," Prince added. "The right answer is for us to be consistently content neutral."

In a company blog post that appeared later on Wednesday, Prince argued that the Internet needed a better system for determining which content should be taken down—one that gives publishers a right to due process and doesn't put power over those decisions in the hands of a few CEOs like Prince.

But, of course, the decision is likely to set a precedent even if Prince hopes it's a one-time occurrence. Cloudflare has helped to establish an industry-wide norm that some content is too offensive to be hosted by any mainstream technology company. In the future, the public will suspect that if an infrastructure provides service to a site, it's because they don't actually find it objectionable. This may not be a genie Cloudflare can stuff back into the bottle.