Church leaders. In an hour he will address the utah state legislate your about National Monument designations. Well have live coverage another 2 40 eastern time. This week on the communicators we went to introduce you to matthew prince, the cofounder and ceo of a Company Called cloud fair, based in San Francisco. Mr. Prince, what is cloud fair . Guest cloud fair is a service which is helping build a better internet. Had we all known what the internet was going to be 30 years when the first protocols were designed we would have made it more secure, all available, and given users of it insight into how it was working. We run a network that spans the globe. We have seven million customers from tiny businesses to fortune 50 companies and we ensure theyre 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. We one run of the Largest Networks in the world, data Center Thursday 120 cities around the world. We see 10 of all internet requests flow the new york, and you dont know we exist when we do our job right. We just make the internet faster and safe. Host how do you do that . What technologies do you use. Guest we built all of our own software. We have equipment running in those 120 cities. Im sitting in San Francisco right now. The near u. S. Data center nissan hoe, we wave haun outside of washington, dc in ashburn, south dakota. When you visit a customer youll be directed to whatever the closest data center to you is. If you are in washington, dc and you went to metallica. Com, a longtime customer of ours, you would hit our data center in ashburn, virginia, and we would do analysis loren you are trying to hack the site or an actual metallica fan. If you were trying to hack it, we would stop new in virginia. If you were fan we would put you on a fast lane to get to the content queue were trying to get to as quickly as possible. Again, from the end users perspective, that should just look like the internet work. Host how long transaction goes through your network on a typical day or week. Guest billions or trillions. We do about five billion page viewsber cloud flare employee. 2. 5 million passing through our infrastructure. 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 . I didnt tweet that. That came from an internal email we sent to people who were employees of cloudflare the incident referring to one of cloudflares seven million users was a particular neonazi site, known as the daily stormer, every day 50,000 people sign if four cloudflare, thing that are totally noncontroversial to sometimes some controversial things. We see 10 of all internet requests and see 10 of the really horrible and horrific things on the internet. In this case the daily stormer was using our service and they had come under had been kicked off of both googles Registrar Service and go daddys Registrar Service and we received pressure to kick them off of our service as well. We changed our dish 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 vial content that was being published on the daley stormer we didnt want to have in our network. This a one and only time you have kicked off a site or closed down a site. Guest we are a lawavoiding company. When we get a court order or other Legal Process that requires us to do something, then well follow that Legal Process. 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. What i went on to talk about in a number of forums is why that is actually pretty dangerous exception. If youre trying to put content on the internet, you need to rely on a service like cloudflare in order to make sure it stays fast and safe and available. If someone like me is able to make the determination of what content can and cannot be online, invisible service that everybody watch this has used in the last 240 hours but dont know when youre using it, that poses challenge 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 guess or bad online. Host in a wall street journal editorial you wrote at some level its easy to fire nazis as customers, but the upshot is a few private companies have effectively become thegatekeepers to the become the gatekeepers to the public square. Guest yes. We didnt make money off the customers we have a free version of our service which most troublesome customers end up using, and so if anything we people were applauding our decision to not let these people use our network, about what i worry about is at you create 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 reverting to the lowest common denominator, and right now its easy to kick neonazis off and sea that it bad and thats universally acclaimed, but over time, those decisions just get more and more tricky, and in the intervening time since we made that decision, we have 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 exus and in theow nazy wings to leftwing sites that might have some controversial content. Which we have no idea why anyone would want to kick them off other than maybe they didnt like what was on it. Once you start down the path of saying that this invisible deep Instruction Company running rune network gets to make decisions, dont think you might like where you come out at the other end. Its a little akin to if the phone company was listening in on the conversations you had and decided they didnt like your tone of voice her to language you were using or the topics you were discussing, if pulled the cord or strut down the phone line that violates the social contract we have with the phone company. A number of Companies Like cloudflare that are the deep infrastructure that runs behind the scenes and makes the internet work. The question is whether or not were 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, we cant live up to the sort of transparency and accountable and consistency that due process requires. Mr. Prince, should the daily stormer be allowed to have a site online somewhere . Guest i think that again is a question that is above my pay grade. I think that is a question that societies have to make and determine for themselves. I think in the United States, which is a country agree up a up. Im a son of a journalist. We have tradition of free speech and protections of that, and we have a history of defending even ugly, vial speech, under the theory that having more speech is the best way to defeat speech in the sense that upping ugly speech and that repertoryship that censorship does not work. That is unique to the United States and there are different history itself youre a german or a turk or someone who is 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 daler stormer doesnt need to exist. What 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 in, germany the answer might be the daily storm should not be available jalen and in the United States it should be Available Online and each individual jurisdiction has the right to decide that, and that it, again, shouldnt be decided by shep deep Infrastructure Company like cloudflare. Host are transnational entities such as cloudflare, will they supersede the First Amendment . Sunny think the First Amendment applies within the United States, and that the regulation and that applies to the government restriction within the United States. As a private company, cloud flare or any Technology Company can make whatever determinations it wants to make based on its terms of service. We dont have an obligation to provide service to anyone. That said, again, i come from a tradition where Free Expression and free surprise is is a sacrosanct policy but we have to respect other jurisdiction i around the world have defendant policies. Its dangerous if you have a deep Infrastructure Company making editorial decisions on what content can and cannot be online. Host in blog boast on your web site, you ask the question, where do you regulate content on in the internet . Did you have an answer for that. Guest i think the framework that makes sense for me, because it is so glowly applicable, i is not the First Amendment or free speech framework, but instead to think about where who can follow principles of due process . 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 read egg the newspaper, you know whose newspaper youre reading and there may have been the consecutive newspaper or the liberal newspaper, but you understand the editorial point of view. Theres a masthead that hises the publisher is and the different editors. Every article has a byline which is that transparency and accountability and consistency that you do mannedded and in the newspaper context if something wag wrong that it publish corrections. You may not have any idea who the Printing Press was behind the escapes, scenes and if te editor or publish ore the newspaper makes the decision on what can and cannot be in the newspaper, that follows the social contract we have with newspapers. If the Printing Press operator, on the other hand, reads an article and says i dont like the way this is, im going to change a few words here to make it instead of being positive article, a negative article, that changes the social context, which is in place. If you fastforward to the internet era, the question is, who is the newspaper operator and who is the Printing Press operator . Cloudflareer miss akin to the Printing Press, wind the seens and 99. 9 of the people passing through our network have no idea we exist. 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 facebook site you know youre on facebook site. When youre on google, you know youre on google. 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 you see or the things you dont see versus the things you do see. That is a place where theres a much greater expectation that they can exercise editorial control and if that go beyond what is rome, that they can be held to account for it. Theyre much closer to being a newspaper and better place to think about when youre exercising control online. That doesnt mean that they should should not allow one type of cop tent or another content or another but it is less problematic when you have Companies Already acting at editors, making editorial defenses than deep Infrastructure Companies and theres no expectation theyre making decisions. Host whats browsers or hosts should they also be the editorial are bitter ashe temperatures . Should thats the social contract we have to work out. Two day before we kicked the daily storm off our service, google kicked them off the Registrar Service, the service theyy to purchase theyre domain name. What is interesting is google didnt kick them off any of their other services. So they didnt delist them from search, they did not kick them off the dns services they run. Did not push an update to chrome, the browser 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 there it is a complicated set of decisions which requires nuance and it is not simply, did google keep them on or kick then off . Google decided for one particular service, it did not make sense for the daily stormer to use that service, but for other services, including the browser, that they didnt think it was right for them to push out an update to block it. They could have done that technically, and the question is, then, as users of technology, what this social contract we have with those techologies 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 ineffected with mallware. Seems like its rate. Would be very effort of uncomfortable if my becauser said if you visit this page you might be exposed to ugly ideas we dont think you should see. He that doesnt feel like the right thing for a browser to do. These are social contracts worked out over a long period of time. The internet is 30 years old, and so we havent had the time really figure out as a society where the right places for this regulation to be put in place and this editorial decisions deo be put in place or but im hopeful we as a vote dire we would find it strange if the phone company pulled the plug when he said something bad. Well work out as a society where its right to have editorial decisions and where its wrong. Host well, is this a role there is a role in this editorial decisionmaking for the federal got, for the fcc, for the congress . Guest i think potentially. But we have to remember that all of these companies are operating in a very multinational environment. So i think in each of those different jurisdictions, the are going to be sets of rules in place on what content is and is not allowed. Frankly, the Law Enforcement, congress, the court system, those are institutions in this country that have a political legitimacy that goes way beyond myself or Mark Zuckerberg or anyone else that is running a Technology Company. What at some level we are trying to follow what the law is. Where i think this gets murky is when were making determinations on, begin, 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 protection, 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, National Border . Guest it depends. I think what a country like china has done a lot to be able to regulate the way the content flows in and out of their borders. That it has come at 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 countries with the level of internet use you have. You have four exit opinion inside china and all of which have to pass through a infrastructure and creates a bottleneck and choke point. If you talk in china to engineers who are trying to develop new technology and new code, one thing that ive heard is just a often times a longing for access to tools like google and otherwise, not so much to get what would be politically controversial continent china but simply to find code samples or find answers to problems to solve the different whatever technical problem they want to solve. So, i think that the more that you restrict access to information, increase logily that comes at a cost to the ability to be creative and develop solutions, and so i think that countries that good down the path of china were seeing a lot of them, increasingly a popular position across europe to say lets follow the path that china has blazed here in terms of creating National Borders and content re strikes that. The more you do that, it comes at a cost of limiting access to should tools that are quite out of the political realm put might be important for people trying to build Innovative New technologies or develop the future. Host well, matthew prince, as a ceo of a transnational company, have you had to adhere to chinas restrictions, germanys restrictions in your work . Guest sure. So, we run Data Centers Across china and in china, one of the regulation is is that content broadcast from inside the country has to have what is called an icp license, and so there are customers of ours that can be announced inside our infrastructure, inside childrens because they have those licenses and there are a ooh customers that cannot. That doesnt make them any less accessible than they would have been otherwise, but that is complying with the law in china. The same thing is true in germany, same thing is true in united kingdom. In the uk there are restrictions on con