We want to introduce you to matthew prince, the owner of a Company Called cloudflare. What is cloudflare . Matthew if we had known what the internet was, we would have insight into how was working. Cloudflare runs a network that spans the globe, we have 7 million customers that range from tight Small Businesses up to fortune 50 companies and we ensure that they are fast, safe, always available no matter who is accessing them online, protecting them from hackers and making sure good guys get through. To do that, we run one of the Largest Networks in the world. We have data centers and 120 cities around the world. About 10 of all internet requests flow through our network. When we do our job right, you do not know we exist. Peter how do you do this . What technologies do you use . Matthew we have built all of our own software. We have equipment in those 120 cities. Oursan francisco nearest data center is in san jose. We have one outside washington, d. C. , in ashburn, virginia. You will be to elected you will be directed to whatever the closest data center is. If you are in washington, d. C. , and he went to metallica. Com, you would hit our data center in ashburn, virginia, where we would do an analysis on whether or not you are trying to hack the site somehow or you are an actual metallica fan. If you are trying to hack it we would stop you in ashburn, virginia, and if you are a fan we would put you on a fashion on a fast plane across the internet to get you to the content you wanted. From the users perspective, that should just like the internet working the way it should. Peter how many transactions go for your neck go through your network on a typical day . Matthew billions are chileans, it took billions or trillions , it depends how you count that. We do page views for cloudflare employees, there is about 2. 5 billion page views every month passing through our infrastructure and we see about 2. 5 billion of the worlds Internet Users effectively the entire net the entire internet population passing through our network. Peter back in august you tweeted out, i woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the internet. What is that referring to . Matthew i did not tweak that. Emailame from an internal we sent to employees of cloudflare. What that is referring to is one of the popular 7 million users was a particular neonazi site known as the daily storm or. Every day 15,000 people sign up for cloudflare and they range from things that are noncontroversial to sometimes controversial things. We see 10 of all internet requests and we see 10 of all the horrible and horrific things on the internet. The daily storm or was using our service and they had, under, they had been kicked off both googles Registrar Service and go daddys Registrar Service and we received pressure to kick them off our service as well. Violated what was our policy of being neutral as a network and made the determination that at that point, enough was enough and the contentand the vile that was being published, we did not want to have across our network. Peter is this the only time you have kicked off a site . Matthew we are a law abiding and when we get a court order or other Legal Process that requires us to do something, then we will follow that Legal Process. If you set that aside and you look at times where we have made an editorial decision, i think this was the exception. On to talk about is why that is a dangerous exception. Tryingingly, and youre 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. Tosomeone like me is able make the determination of what content can and cannot be online, an invisible service that everyone who is watching this has used probably hundreds of times in the last 24 hours, you do not know when youre using it, that poses some real challenges from a Public Policy perspective which im not sure i who has been democratically selected to make the decision on what content is good or bad. A wall street journal editorial, you wrote that at some level it is easy to fire customers, but the upshot is a few private companies have become the gatekeepers to the public square. Matthew thats right. In this case, we did not make any money off of these customers. We have a free version of our service which most of our most troublesome customers use. Anything, people were applauding our decision to not let these people use our network. What i worry about is as you create those systems where a very few set of private companies can be making the decision on what content is or is not allowed, that forces us towards reverting to the lowest common denominator. Now, it is easy to kick neonazis off and say that is bad. Over time, those decisions get more and more tricky. 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, those range from other sites that expels neonazi believes to extremely leftwing sites to the sites that are in the middle that might have some controversial content, the sites which frankly we have no idea why anybody would want to kick them off except they do not like what was on it. Ofe you start down the path saying this invisible Infrastructure Company that is running the network gets to make decisions, i do not think you might like where you come out at the other end. Phoneakin to if the company was listening in on the conversations you had and decided they do not like your tone of voice or the language you are using or the topics you are discussing, if they just pulled the cord and shut down the phone lines, that violates the social contracts we have had with the phone company. What is happening is there are number of Companies Like cloudflare that are that deep infrastructure that runs behind the scene and makes the internet work and the 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. Making thate are editorial decision we cannot live up to the transparency and accountability and consistency that due process requires. Should the daily storm or be allowed to have a site online somewhere . Thatew that is a question is above my pay grade. That is a question that societies have to make and determine for themselves. In the United States, which is a country i grew up in, i am the son of a journalist, we have a tradition of free speech and protections. Defendinghistory of speech underle, the theory that more speech is the way to defeat ugly speech and censorship does not work over the long term. What is important to remember is that that history is unique to the United States and there are different histories if youre a german or a turk or someone who is living in china. We have to operate on a global business. We run data centers and all of those places. Individual societies may make different decisions in germany they make they may make a decision that the site does not need to exist. The mosthat whatever restrictive regime around the world sets the policy and that policy that applies globally, and we all revert to what the least common denominator is. Might bey the answer the daily stormer should not be available online, at in the United States it might be that it should be online. Each jurisdiction has the right to decide that and it should not be decided by some Infrastructure Company like cloudflare. Peter are transnational entities such as cloudflare, will they supersede the First Amendment . I think thetthew First Amendment applies within the United States and that applies to government restrictions within the United States. A private company, cloudflare can make whatever determination it once to make based on what its terms of service are and we do not have an obligation to provide service to anyone. I come from a tradition where Free Expression is a sacrosanct policy. We have to respect that other jurisdictions around the world have different policies. I think what is dangerous is if you have a deep Infrastructure Company making editorial decisions. Peter in a blog post you posted on your cloudflare website, you youd the question, where do like where do you regulate content on the internet . And you have an answer to that . Matthew the framework that makes sense to me is not the First Amendment or free speech framework. Instead, to think about who can follow principles of due process. The three key pieces to due process are transparency, accountability, and consistency. If you think about it, who is being those of things . In the pretechnology, preinternet context, if youre reading the newspaper, you know whose newspaper you are reading and there may have been the conservative newspaper, the liberal newspaper, but you understand through the editorial point of view, there is a masthead that lists to the publisher is, who the editors ,re, every article has a byline which is again that transparency and consistency you demanded. In a newspaper context, if something was wrong, they would publish a correction. You may not have any idea who the Printing Press was behind the scenes. If the editor or publisher of the newspaper makes a decision on what can and cannot be in the newspaper, that follows the social contract we have with newspapers. If the Printing Press operator reads an article and says i do not like the way this is, im going to change a few words and make it instead of a positive article, a negative article, that changes the social context which is in place. If you fastforward to the internet error to the internet era, the question is who is the newspaper operator and who is the Printing Press operator . Cloudflares akin to the Printing Press operator. 99. 9 of the people have no idea we exist. Not we decide something is allowed or is allowed it is difficult structure early for us to be transparent about that. As a result, it is difficult for us to follow what are good process what are good practices of due process. When you are on facebook, you know youre on facebook. To ais much more arcane newspaper and fundamentally, if theyhink about facebook, inherently are performing what is an editorial task, they are ranking information and editing out the things you do not see versus the things 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. They are much closer to being a newspaper and therefore a much better place for you to think about when you are exercising control online. That does not mean they should or should not allow one type of content or another, but i think it is less problematic when you have companies that are already acting as editors making editorial decisions then when you have deep Infrastructure Companies that there is no expectation and they are acting as editors making those decisions. Peter what about browsers or hosts, should they be the editorial arbiters . That is the social contract we have to work out. If you look at the example of the daily stormer and google. Before we kick the daily stormer off of our service, google kicked them off their Registrar Service, the service they used to purchase their domain name. Google did not take them off any of their other services. They did not delist them from search, they did not kick them off the dns service they run. They did not push an update to chrome that would block access to them. 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 it is not simply, did google take them off or keep them on . For oneecided that particular service did not make sense for the daily stormer to use that service, but for other services, including the browser, they do not think it was right for them to block it. As users of technology, what is the social contract we have with those technologies and where do we expect editorial control to come in . Fine whenser i am chrome puts up a warning that says if you visit this page you will be infected with malware. That seems right. I would be uncomfortable of my malware if my browser said if you visit this page you might be exposed to ugly ideas. That does not feel like the right thing for a browser to do. These are social contracts that get worked off over a long period of time. The internet is 30 years old. We have not have the time to figure out as a society where the light plate where the right places for this regulation to be put in place and these editorial decisions to be put in place are. Over time, i am hopeful that we as a society just as we would find it strange of the phone company were listening in, we it is rightt where to have editorial decisions and where it is wrong. A role in this editorial decisionmaking for the federal government, for the fcc, for the congress . Matthew potentially. We have to remember that all of these companies are operating in a multinational environment. 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. Lawenforcement, congress, the those areem, institutions in this country that have a political legitimacy that goes way beyond myself or elsezuckerberg or anyone that is running a technology company. Level, we are trying to follow what the law is. Where i think this gets murky is when we are making determinations on what content is good and not good online. , because ofd states the First Amendment and because of the deep freedom of expression protection, i think you are going to have much less content restrictions here then you will see in places like europe or china. Prince, theew technology is there to shut off content at a border, at a National Border . Matthew it depends. What a country like china has done, has done a lot to regulate the way that content flows in and out of their borders. 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 with aor other countries level of internet use you have. You have four exit points from china and all of those have to pass through infrastructure, all of which creates a bottleneck and a chokepoint. If you talk in china to engineers who are trying to develop new technology and new code, one of the things i have , often times, a longing for access to tools like google and otherwise. Not to get what would be politically controversial content, but to find code samples or answers to problems to solve those different to solve whatever technical problem they want to be solving. The more you restrict access to information, increasingly that comes at a cost to the ability to be creative and develop solutions. That go down the path of china, and we are seeing a lot of them, it is increasingly a popular position across europe to say lets follow the path china has blazed here in terms of creating National Borders and content restrictions there. The more you do that, that does come at a cost of living access to tools that are quite outside the political realm but might the important for people trying to build Innovative Technologies or develop the future. Matthew prince, as a ceo of a transnational company, have you had to adhere to chinas restrictions, germanys restrictions in your work . Matthew 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. Customers of hours that can be announced inside our infrastructure inside china because they have those licenses and their other customers that cannot. That does make them less accessible than they would have been otherwise, that is complying with the law in china. The same thing is true in germany, the same thing is true in the United Kingdom. In the United Kingdom there are restrictions on content that can and cannot be put in place and we have to deal with those regulations and restrictions as a company that operates in those places, has equipment in those places and employees in those places. Increasingly, the challenge is that it is easy when you are sitting in any particular country to think it is just your laws that apply, but the company likethat a ours has to operate in jurisdictions all around the world. What is important is that if you listen to chinese regulators, they will talk about how they have the right to be able to regulate their infrastructure. That itnswer to is hard to argue against that. I think the right answer is that while china has the sovereign right to regulate infrastructure inside china, the minute the 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. What i think as an infrastructure we need to think about is how, when there is regulation that applies in any one country, it can affect that country but it cannot spillover beyond that country. Principles of due process of applied globally and are respected around the world. This means that if there is contention on content, imposed in one particular place or another, that needs to be transparent. In the case of google, when google has to under the eu right to be forgotten has to remove content, it is important they put something up there that says we were ordered to do this under a court order and here is an example of the court order and here is you you should talk to if you do not think this