Differently. Made it more secure, made sure it as all available and giving users insight how i was working. So what we do is run a network that spans the globe. We have seven million customs from tiny beens to fortune 50 companies and we make theyre fast, safe, always available no matter who is accessing them online, protecting them from hackers, make sugar the good guys get through on a fast lane. We run one of the largest nextworks in the world, data centers in 120 cities around the world. See 10 of all internet requests and win make the internet faster and safer behind the scenes. Host chew you do senate what technologies do you use. Guest we built all of our own software. We have equipment in 120 cities. Anytime San Francisco right now and the near it data center nissan jose. We have one outside of washington, dc ashburn, venezuela. When you visit a customer youll be direct whatever the closest data center to you is. So, if you are in washington, dc and you went to met tall could. Com, who is a longtime customer of ours, you hit our data center in ashburn, virginia. There we do analysis on whether or not you were trying hack the site somehow or whether you are an actual metallica fan. With you were a hacker we would stop you, i if you were a fan, we would put you on the fast lane to get you to your information. From the end users privilege that should look like the internet working the way it should. Host how many transactions go through your network on a typical day, typical week. Billions or trillions. Depends on how you count that. We do about five billion page views per cloudfare employee so thats 2. 5 trillion page views every single month passing through our infrastructure, and we see about 2. 5 billion of the worlds internet years, effectively the entire internet population, passing through our network on a monthly basis. Host well, back in august, mr. Prince, you tweet out, quote, i woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off thier. What that referring to. Guest i didnt tweet that, that was from an internal email we sent to people who were employees of cloudfare. What that is an incident specifically referring to is that one of cloudfares seven million users was a particular neonazi site, the daily stormer, every day 50,000 people sign are four cloudfare and they rang from things that are totally noncontroversial to sometimes some comfort things. We see 10 of all internet requests requests and 10 of the he horrible 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 gad daddys Registrar Service and we received pressure to kick them off of our service as well. So we actually changed our 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 vial content that was being published on the daily stormer we didnt want to have going across the network. This the one and only time you kicked off a site or closes down a site. Guest were a lawabiding company. When we gate court order or other Legal Process that requires us to do, some well follow the Legal Process. If you set that aside and 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 numb number of forums why thats dangerous exception. If youre trying to put content on the internet you need to rely on a service like cloudfare in order to make sure it stays fast and safe and available. If one like me is able to make the determination of what content can and cannot be online, an invisible service that every that has used probably hundreds of times in the last 24 hours but dont know when youre using it, that poses some real challenges from a Public Policy perspective, which im not sure that i am the person who has been sort of democratic include 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. In this case, these we didnt make any money off of these customers we have a preversion of our service which our most troublesome customers end up using, and so if anything, we people were applauding our conversation to not let these people use our network. I worry about if 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 itseese to kick neonazis off and says that bad and universally acclaimed. He over time those decisions just get more and more tricky, and in this 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 thats range from other sites that espouse knee or controversial content and we dont know why they would want to be kicked off. Once you start down the path of saying that 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 akeen to if the phone company was listening in on the conversations you had and decided 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 we have with the phone company for quite some time. There are number of Companies Lime cloudfare that are that deep infrastructure that runs behind the scenes and makes the internet work. The questioner is whether or not were the right ones to make 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 accountability and consistency that due process really requires. Host well, 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 i grew up in, im the son of a journalist. We have a 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 ugly speech and cent soreship does not work. What i think is important to learn is that history is unique to the United States and theres different histories if youre german or a turk or someone who is living in china. So we have to operate on a global basis. We run dat centers and individual societies may make different decisions in germ may they may decide the daily storm are does not need exist. What i worry ises that it whatever is the most restrictive regime around the world set the policies and that that policy applies globally, we all revert to the least common denominator in germany the answer might be the daily storm should not be Available Online but in the United States it might be it should be Available Online, and each individual jurisdiction has the right to decide that, and that it again shouldnt be decided by some deep Infrastructure Company like cloudfare. Host are transnational entity such as cloudfare will they supersede the First Amendment . Guest well, i think the First Amendment applies within the United States, and that the regulation that applies to the government restriction within the United States. As a private company, cloudfare or any Technology Company can make whatever determinations it wants to make based on what its terms of service and are we dont have an obligation to provide service to anyone. That said, again, i come from a tradition where Free Expression and free speech is a sack sacrosanct policy and we have to respect other countries around the world have different policies. Its dangerous if you have a deep Infrastructure Company making editorial decisions on what content can and cannot be online. Host in a blog post on your cloudfare web site, you ask the question where do you regulate content on the internet . Did you have an answer for that . Host roo r. Guest i think the framework that makes a lot of sense for me because its so global, i not the First Amendment or free speech framework but instead to think about who can 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 . If you think 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 liberal newspaper but you understand the editorial point of view. Theres a masthead that lists ls who the publish are is, the diseditors are, every article at a byline, which again is that transparency and accountability and consistency that you demanded. In the up in context, if something was wrong, then they would publish corrections. You may not have any idea who the Printing Press was behind the scenes. And if the editor or publisher of 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 presents press operator read an article and says dont particularly like the way this is, im going to change a few words here to make it instead of being positive article, a neglect tough article, that changes the social context, and 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 . I think cloudfare is something more akin to prisoning press, rounding hind the scenes that 99. 99 of people passing through our network have no idea that we even 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 governor practices of due process. On the other hand, when your on oen facebook site you know youre on facebook. When youre on google, you know youre on going. That is much more akin to a newspaper and 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 there is much greater expectation they can exercise editorial contractual, and if they go beyond whats reasonable, they can be held to account for it. Theyre much closer to bag newspaper and therefore a much better place for you think about when youre exercising control online. Doesnt mean they should or should not allow one type of content or another, but again issue 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 theyre acting as yesterday doctors and making those decision uses what about browsers or hosed . Should they also be theeder to arby ters. Guest thats social contract we have to work out. Look at the daily stormer and google. The day before we kick then off, google kicked them off the Registrar Service, the service they use to purchase their dough domain name. Going did not kick them off the services, did not push an update to chrome, the browser they run that would block access to them. 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, did google keep them on or kick them off. Going decided for one particular service it did not make sense for the daily storm for use that service but other services, including the browser, they didnt thicket was right for them to push out an updo it block it. They tech i particularly could have done technically could have done that. At users of technology, what is the social contract we have with those technologies and where do we suspect editorial control 0 to come o in . On the browser im fine that chrome puts up a warning thatsive i you visit this page youll get ineffected with mall almaliki mallware. I would prefer it say if you visit this page, you might be supposed to ugly idea. Thats not right for a browser to do. These are social contracts worked out over a lock period of time. The internet is 30 years old and we have not had time to figure out as a society where the right plates for this regulation to be put in place, these editor decisions to be put in place, but i am hopeful we as a society, just find it strange if the phone company were listening in and pulled the plug when he said something bad issue think well work out as a society where its right to have editorial decisions and where its wrong. Host well, is thats role there is a role in this editorial decisionmaking for the federal government, for the fcc, the congress . Guest 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 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 suck Mark Zuckerberg or anybody else running a Technology Company. At some level were trying to follow what the law is. Where i think this gets murky is when were making determinations on, again, what content is good and 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 you are going to have much less content restriction here than youll see in places like europe or china. Host matthew prince, the technology there is, isnt it to shut off content at a border, at a National Border . Guest it depends. I think a country like china has done a lot to be able to regulate the way the content flows in and out of their borders. Thats 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 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 choke point, and if you talk in china to engineers who are trying to develop new czech nothing and new code, one thing that ive heard is, just often times a sort of longing for access to tools like google and otherwise, not so much to get what would be politically controversial content in china but simple flow find code samples or answers to problems to solve those different to solve whatever technical problem they want to be solving. So, i think that the more that you restrict access to information, increasingly that comes at a cost to the able to be creative and develop solutions. So, i think that countries that go 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 was blazed here in terms of national boreds and content restriction. The more you do that, that comes at a cost of limiting access to tools which are outside of the political realm but might be important for people trying to build Innovative New technologies or develop the future. Host well, matthew prince, as ceo of a transnational company, have you had to adhere to chinas restrictions, germanys restrictions in your work . Guest sure. We run Data Centers Across china, and in china one of the regulations is that content that is 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 china, because they have the licenses and other customers that cannot. That doesnt make them any less accessible than they would have been otherwise but that is completion with the law in china. Same thing is true in germany, same thing is true in other unite kingdom. In United Kingdom there are restrictions on kent attendant that content that can and cannot be put in place and we have to deal with those revelations and restrictions as a company that has equipment in places and has employees in those places, and i think thats the challenge, is that its very easy when your in any particular country to think that its just your laws that apply, but the challenge is that could a company like ours has to operate in jurisdictions all around the world. What is important is that if you listen to the chinas regulators they talk about how they have a sovereign right to regulate their infrastructure. I think that the right answer to that its hard not to argue against that, but i think the right answer is that while china has a sovereign right to regulate infrastructure inside china, the meant their regulations extend beyond china to regulate thailand or vietnam or the United States or canada, that inherently is infringing on the sovereign right of those countries around the rest of the world. And i think as an infrastructure we need to think about is how, when there is regulation