A Company Called cloudflare. He is based in San Francisco. Mr. Prince, what is cloudflare . Guest cloudflare is a service which is helping build a better internet. Had we all known what the internet was going to be 30 years ago, we would have done things differently. We would have made it more secure, made sure it was always available and given users of it insight into how it was work. So what cloudflare does is we run a network that spans the globe. We have seven million customers that range from tiny, little Small Businesses up to some of the fortune 50 companies, and we insure that they are fast, safe, always available no matter who is accessing them anywhere online, protecting them from hackers, making sure the good guys get through on a fast lane. And we run one of the Largest Networks in the world, so so we have data centers in 120 cities around the world, we see about 10 of all internet requests flow through our network. And when were doing our job right, you dont know we exist. Host how do you do that . What technologies do you use . Guest so we built all of our own software. So we have equipment running in those 120 cities. Im sitting in San Francisco right now, so our nearest data center is in san jose. We have one outside of washington, d. C. In ashburn, virginia. When you visit one of our customers, youll be directed to whatever the closest data center to you is. So if you are in washington, d. C. And you went to, i dont know, metallica. Com whos a longtime customer of ours, you would hit our data center in ashburn, virginia. There we would do analysis on whether or not you are trying to hack the site somehow or whether you are an actual metallica fan. If you were trying to hack it, we would stop you there, otherwise, wed put you on a fast lane to get you to the content youre trying to the get to as quickly as possible. And, again, from the end users perspective, that should just look like the internet working in the way it should. Host how many transactions go through your networks on a typical day, typical week . Guest billions or trillions, depends on how you count that. We do about five billion page views per cloudflare employee. So thats about 2. 5 trillion page views every single month passing through our infrastructure. And we see about 2. 5 billion of the worlds internet users, effectively the entire internet population passing through our network on a monthly basis. Host well, back in august, mr. Prince, you tweeted out, quote i woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the internet. What is that referring to . Guest i didnt tweet that. That was, came from an internal email that we sent to people who were employees of cloudflare. What that is an incident thats specifically referring to that one of cloudflares seven million users was a particular neonazi site known as the daily stormer. Every day 15,000 people sign up for cloudflare, and they range from, again, things that are totally noncontroversial to sometimes some controversial things. We see 10 of all internet requests, and we see probably 10 of all the really horrible and horrific things on the internet. In this case, the daily stormer was using our service, and they had come under they had been kicked off of both googles Registrar Service and godaddys service, and increasingly we received pressure to kick them off of our service as well. And so we actually changed or i would say violated what was our policy of being neutral as a network and made the determination that at that point enough was enough, and the vile content that was being published on the daily stormer, we didnt want to have it going across our network. Host is this the one and only time that youve kicked off a site or closed down a site . Guest i would say you know, were a lawabiding company, and so when we get a court order or other Legal Process that requires us to do something, then well follow that Legal Process. But if you set that aside and you look at just times where we have ourselves made an editorial decision, i think this was the exception. And what i went on to talk about in a number of forums is why that actually is a pretty dangerous exception. Increasingly, if youre trying to put content on the internet, you need to rely on a service like cloudflare in order to make sure that it stays fast and safe and available. And if someone like me is able to make the determination of what content and cannot be online, an invisible service that, you know, everyone thats watching this has used probably hundreds of times in the last 24 hours but you dont even know when youre using it, that, i think, poses some real challenges from a Public Policy perspective which im not sure that i am the person who has been sort of democratically selected to be making the decision on what content is good or bad online. Host well, in a wall street journal editorial, you wrote that at some level its easy to fire nazis as customers, but the upshot is that a few private companies have effectively become the gatekeepers to the public square. Guest thats right. You know, in this case these we didnt make any money off of, off these customers. We have a free version of our service which most of our most troublesome customers end up using. And so if anything, you know, we people were applauding our decision to not let these people use our network. But what i worry about is that as you create those, those systems where a very few set of private companies can be making the decision on what content is and is not allowed, that that forces us towards, you know, reverting to sort of the lowest common denominator and, you know, right now its easy to kick neonazis off and say thats bad and thats sort of universally acclaimed, but over time, you know, those decisions just get more and more tricky. And in this intervening time since we made that decision, weve had requests from a number of people around the world to kick over 3500 of our customers offline, and those range from other sites that espouse, you know, neonazilike beliefs to extremely leftwing sites to sites in the middle that might have controversial content to sites which, frankly, we have no idea why anyone would want to kick them off, maybe they just didnt like what was on it. Once you start down the path of saying this invisible deep Infrastructure Company that is running the network gets to make decisions, i dont think that you might like where you come out at the other end. Its a little bit akin to if the phone company was listening in on the conversations that you had and decided that they didnt like your tone of voice or the language you were using or the topics you were discussing, if they just pulled the cord and shut down the phone line. That violates a social contract which weve had with the phone company for quite some time. What i think is happening is that there are a number of Companies Like cloudflare that are that deep infrastructure that runs behind the scenes and makes the internet work. And the core question is whether or not we are the right ones to be making the decision on what content should and should not be allowed online. I worry that if were the ones making that editorial decision, that we cant live up to the sort of transparency and accountability and consistency that due process really requires. Host well, mr. For prince, should the daily stormer be allowed to have a site on line somewhere . Guest i think that, again, is a question that is above my pay grade. You know, i think that that is a question that societies have to make and determine for themselves. I think in the United States, which is the country that i grew up in, im the son of a journalist, you know, we have a tradition of free speech and protections of that and that we have a history of defending even ugly, vile speech under the theory that having more speech is the best way to defeat speech, ugly speech and that censorship doesnt work over the long term. What i think is important to remember though is that that history is uniquely, unique to the United States and there are very different histories if youre a german or a turk or someone whos live anything china. Living in china. And so we have to operate on a global basis. We run data centers in all of those places. And individual societies may make different decisions. In germany, for instance, they may make a decision that the daily stormer doesnt need to exist. What i worry is that if whatever the most restrictive regime is around the world sets the policy and that policy then applies globally, that we all then revert to what the least common denominator is. And so in germany the answer might be, no, the daily stormer shouldnt be online, but in the United States it might be that it should be available online. And i think each individual jurisdiction has the right the decide that and that it, again, shouldnt be decided by some deep Infrastructure Company like cloudflare. Host so are transnational entities such as cloudflare, etc. , will they supersealed the First Amendment . Supersede the First Amendment . Guest well, again, i think that First Amendment applies within the United States and that the and that applies to government restriction within the United States. As a private company, you know, cloudflare or any Technology Company can make whatever determinations that it wants to make based on what its terms of service are, and we dont have an obligation to provide service to anyone. That said, again, you know, i come from a a tradition where, you know, free expression, free speech is a sacrosanct policy. But i think we have to respect that other jurisdictions around the world have different policies. And so again, i think whats dangerous is if you have a deep Infrastructure Company making editorial decisions on what content and cannot be online. Host and in a blog post that you posted on your Cloudflare Web site, you asked the question where do you regulate content on the internet. Did you have an answer for that . Guest well, you know, i think the framework that makes a lot of sense for me because it is so globally applicable is actually not the First Amendment or free speech framework, but instead to think about where who can, who can follow principles of due process. And the three key pieces to due process are transparency, accountability and consistency. And if you think about it, who is even capable of being those things . In the pretechnology sort of preinternet context, if youre reading the newspaper, you know whose newspaper youre reading. And there may have been the conservative newspaper or the liberal newspaper, but you understand sort of the editorial point of view. Theres a masthead that lists who the publisher is, who the different editors are. Every article has a byline which is associated with it which, again, is that transparency and accountability and consistency that you demanded. And in the newspaper context, if something was wrong, then they would publish corrections to that. Thats you may not have any idea who the Printing Press was behind the scenes. And if the editor or publisher of the newspaper makes a decision on what and cannot be in the newspaper, that follows a social contract that we have with newspapers. If the Printing Press operator, on the other hand, reads an article and says i dont particularly like the way this is, im going to change a few words here to make it instead of being a positive article a negative article, that changes the social context which is in place. If you fast forward to the internet era, the question is who is the newspaper operator and whos the Printing Press operator. I think cloudflare is something more akin to the Printing Press, running behind the scenes that 99. 9ed of the people passing through our Network Every month have no idea we even exist. So when we decide that something is not allowed or is allowed, its very, very difficult structurally for us to be transparent about that. And as a result, its very difficult for us to follow what i think are good practices of due process. On the other hand, when youre on facebooks site, you know youre on facebooks site. When youre only on google, you know youre on google. So that is much more akin to a newspaper. And fundamentally, if you think about facebook, they inherently are already performing what is an editorial task. They are ranking information and editing out the things that you see or the things that you dont see versus the things that you do see. That is a place where there is a much greater expectation that they can exercise editorial control, and if they go beyond what is reasonable, that they can be held to account for it. Theyre much closer to being a newspaper and, therefore, a much better place for you to think about when youre exercising control online. That doesnt mean that they should or should not allow one type of content or another. But, again, i think it is less problematic when you have companies that are already acting as editors making editorial decisions than when you have deep Infrastructure Companies that there is no expectation that theyre acting as editors, making those decisions. Host what about browsers or hosts . Should they also be the editorial arbiters . Guest well, again, i think that is a, thats the social contract that we have to work out. For me, you know, you look at the example of the daily stormer and google. So two days before we kicked the daily stormer off of our service, google kicked them off their Registrar Service which is the service that they used to purchase their domain name. What east interesting whats interesting though is google didnt delist them from search, they did not kick them off their dns service that they run, they did not push an update to chrome, the browser that they run that would block access to them. And so what i think that illustrates is not that google did something wrong, but instead that it is a complicated set of decisions which requires nuance. And its not simply, you know, did google keep them on or kick them off. Google decided that for one particular service it did not make sense for the daily stormer to be using that service, but for other Services Including the browser that they didnt think that it was right for them to push out an update to block it. They technically could have done that. And the question is then as users of technology what is the social contract that we have with those technologies and where do we expect editorial control to come in. On my browser im totally fine when chrome puts up a warning that says if you visit this page, youre going to get infected with malware. That seems like its right. I, on the other hand, would be very uncomfortable if my browser said if you visit this page, you might be exposed to some ugly ideas that we dont think you should see. That doesnt feel like the right thing for a browser to do. Whats hard is these are social contracts that get worked out over a long period of time. The internet is 30 years old, and so we havent had the time to really figure out as a society where the right places for this regulation to be put in place, this editorial, these editorial decisions to be put in place are. But over time im hopeful that we as a society will, just as we would find it very strange if the phone company were listening in and pulled the plug when we said something bad, i think we will work out as a society where its right to have editorial decisions and where its wrong. Host well, is there a role in this editorial Decision Making for the federal government, for the fcc, for the congress . Guest i mean, i think potentially. But we have to remember that all of these companies are operating in a very multinational environment. And so i think in each of those different jurisdictions there are going to be sets of rules which are in place on what content is and is not allowed. And, frankly, you know, law enforcement, congress, the court system, those are institutions in this country that have a political legitimacy that goes way beyond, you know, myself or Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else that is running a Technology Company. At some level what we are trying to do is follow what law is. Where i think this gets murky is when were making determinations on, again, what content is good and is not good online. But again, in the United States because of the First Amendment and because of the deep freedom of expression protections, you know, i think that youre going to have much less content restriction here than you will see in places like europe or china. Host but, matthew prince, the technology is there, isnt it, to shut off content at a border, at a National Border . Guest well, it depends. I mean, i think that a country like china has done a lot to be able to regulate the way the content flows in and out of their borders. But that has come at a great cost to them because the performance of the internet inside the country is not nearly what you would see in the United States or western europe or other countries with the level of internet use that you have. You have basically four exit points from china, and all of those have to pass through infrastructure, all of which creates a bottleneck and a chokepoint. And if you talk in china to engineers who are trying to develop new technology and new code, you know, one of the things that ive heard is, you know, just a often times sort of a longing for access to tools like google and otherwise not so much to get, you know, what would be politically controversial content in china, but simply to find code samples or find answers to problems to solve those different, to solve whatever technical problem they want to be