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CloudFlare (Cloudflare CEO Matthew PrinceReuters)
The CEO of Cloudflare said he is "deeply uncomfortable" with his own decision to have his company stop protecting The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website.
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He decided to stop working with The Daily Stormer after its team suggested that Cloudflare sympathized with its Nazi ideology.
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The Daily Stormer's site was taken down by attackers as soon as Cloudflare stopped protecting it.
Until today, Cloudflare had never dropped a customer due to political pressure.
It's this fact that company CEO Matthew Prince said makes him so "deeply uncomfortable" with his decision early Wednesday to stop providing paid services to The Daily Stormer, including protecting its website from attackers.
As it turns out, attackers took down the neo-Nazi site as soon as Cloudflare stopped protecting it, Prince told Business Insider. Daily Stormer remained offline on Wednesday evening.
Daily Stormer drew national scrutiny and condemnation after it published a story that demeaned Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old woman who was killed on Saturday when a car rammed into people counter-protesting against a white-supremacist demonstration in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Prince made clear that he found the website's content "vile." But he regrets that he alone was able to decide its fate.
"The ability of somebody to single-handedly choose to knock content offline doesn't align with core ideas of due process or justice," Prince told Business Insider on Wednesday. "Whether that's a national government launching attacks or an individual launching attacks."
Prince said that his team is set to have a debate over how to address such issues moving forward. An emotional memo he sent to staffers about the decision was obtained by Gizmodo and reads:
"My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I'd had enough...I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet."
How it ended
While Cloudflare may have been Daily Stormer's last line of defense, Prince's decision didn't actually take the company's site offline by itself. Earlier in the week, GoDaddy and Google both publicly announced they had dropped Daily Stormer as a customer of their domain hosting services.
And then there were the attackers.
The site going offline was an outcome imagined by both friends and foes of the neo-Nazi site. One of the services Cloudflare provides is to provide a sort of buffer between visitors and websites, to protect sites from denial-of-service attacks. It does this in part by obfuscating the identity of the websites' hosts. It was that service that helped protect Daily Stormer.