Fascinating. Thanks for your thoughts. You've stated the problem,
comprehensively touching on all the well known talking points, value
balances and even sequencing them as if to imply causality. That's not
bad. But also it doesn't advance the argument to restate the very
circumstances and reasoning to which I object.
Maybe your contribution will bring clarity to others. And moreso if I
also add that this is precisely the moral arithmetic, and conclusion
that technical necessity excuses harms, which is unacceptable.
It's harm tradeoff, not harm excuse. It does harm user privacy.
But it's also harmful to the Internet at large (as in "all the users of the Internet") if service operators can't keep a service online because it's swamped by malicious users (or, arguably worse, it is online but the nature of its use is so badly understood by its operators that it's serving as a springboard for larger, more coherent attacks).
Services like Cloudflare allow operators to outsource the knowledge of how to mitigate those issues. This increases the total services that can be provided online by lowering the knowledge floor via specialization, which makes the Internet "bigger" (in terms of more things you can do with / on it).
> It's harm tradeoff, not harm excuse. It does harm user privacy.
I am looking from the viewpoint of someone whose privacy and
opportunity are harmed, so of course I have my biases. :)
> But it's also harmful to the Internet at large
A good argument to try, but not sure this "nebulous" harm, as JS Mill
might say, really works. For many reasons; "The Internet" hasn't been
a coherent, level entity for some time now. No doubt you've heard the
term "splinternet" - something to which I actually think problems like
Cloudflare contribute. And there's an implication that a "service
provider" somehow outweighs a single user. Which seems nonsense since
many "services" are one man shows with a handful of users while there
are some individual users of great prominence, power and
value. Besides, the Internet in it's "virgin" (most unharmed) form
might be said to be purely peer-to-peer. The nebulous harms you
propose really apply to a certain "kind" of internet, supporting
certain kinds of interests.
> Services like Cloudflare allow operators to outsource the knowledge
> of how to mitigate those issues.
They are outsourcing action, not just knowledge. Like a private police
force Cloudflare are actively (and literally) intervening in third
party business and taking punitive actions against individuals based
entirely on their judge, jury and executioner logic. That is a lot
less innocent than you make it sound. The users are outsourcing their
judgement, while swerving their responsibilities as netizens.
> This increases the total services that can be provided online by
lowering the knowledge floor via specialisation, which makes the
Internet "bigger" (in terms of more things you can do with / on it).
As we've discussed in these pages many times, and under many topics
and titles, growth is not an unqualified good. Scale is not
unquestionably desirable. Quality is rarely commensurate with either.
So I am not swayed by the argument that having some of the network
avoidably broken is justified by extending its size.
I see your concerns, but when the system was built, at the protocol level, to be heavily trust-assuming, but many individual users are untrustworthy, and you can't distinguish them without collecting information that could be considered privacy-violating, what is the solution?
I, for one, have a blog that I don't use Cloudflare for. There's a risk that my system gets hugged to death and I don't know until my service provider either notifies me or cuts me. And from a certain point of view, I might be considered a negligent actor because I'm not collecting enough information to know if somebody has breached my blog engine and turned it into part of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon. But I've chosen to value user privacy.
Point is, trade-offs. I don't think I'm in some kind of moral right space for my decisions, I've made them based on the kind of reader I expect to get.
Maybe your contribution will bring clarity to others. And moreso if I also add that this is precisely the moral arithmetic, and conclusion that technical necessity excuses harms, which is unacceptable.