The dumb pipe is DNS + ip routing. No one wants to share or sell their smart pipes (CDN, analytics, cloud platform, etc.) into a powder keg.
> Imagine if real life utilities did this
TV & Radio platforms have declined to provide amplification to numerous fringe ideas / platforms over the years. As a direct "knowledge/information utility" that corollary carries the most weight for me.
But again, DNS is the real "utility" or "road" to me here -- Cloudflare et al are hotels along the road, and private property holders have declined to house people since the inception of private property. There's nothing to prevent 8chan from delivering it's message; but they may have to be careful with their biz. relationships, which is a lesson they should have been learning for years.
Why is a CDN a "smart pipe" but DNS is not? That seems like a rather arbitrary distinction to me.
Is the internet not a "knowledge/information utility"? Do CDNs not provide critical protection against DDOS attacks? How then does denying service not "prevent 8chan from delivering it's message"?
CDNs are not the only way to provide protection against DDOS, they're a packaged offering combining multiple technologies but there's nothing preventing you from running geolocated servers, on multiple providers, with ddos mitigation you buy/build yourself. Blocking at the DNS layer (through multi-party action I guess) is going to be an insurmountable hurdle. Wanting cloudflare or any other company to offer you prerolled infrastructure as a right is ludicrous. This distinction is anything but arbitrary.
Maybe not strictly insurmountable. But building your own massively distributed infrastructure capable of resisting DDOS attacks is expensive. Perhaps prohibitively so, depending on the size of your budget.
You could just as easily argue that since DNS blocks can technically be overcome by directing users to a specific IP address, or by using an alternate name server infrastructure like Namecoin, that DNS isn't critical.
> Imagine if real life utilities did this
TV & Radio platforms have declined to provide amplification to numerous fringe ideas / platforms over the years. As a direct "knowledge/information utility" that corollary carries the most weight for me.
But again, DNS is the real "utility" or "road" to me here -- Cloudflare et al are hotels along the road, and private property holders have declined to house people since the inception of private property. There's nothing to prevent 8chan from delivering it's message; but they may have to be careful with their biz. relationships, which is a lesson they should have been learning for years.