Nobody has a right to a CDN or a right to DDOS protection. Cloudflare is a private company offering a service in exchange for money. They may deny service to whomever they wish (with exceptions for certain protected classes). Political leanings and ideologies do not constitute a protected class. Neither Cloudflare, nor Google, nor FaceBook, nor Reddit, nor HN for that matter have any legal or moral obligation to grant a platform to anyone. A private platform reserves all rights to the content on their platform. If you have an issue with how that is policed or moderated then you are free to create your own competing service.
You're falling back on the legal argument again. Again: Free Speech is not a law, it's a principle.
Sure, even without a CDN a sufficiently well-funded organization could spend millions of dollars on the infrastructure necessary to resist a powerful DDOS attack. But if that's enough in your mind to satisfy the principle of free speech, then you're essentially saying that it's okay if it costs millions of dollars to speak freely on the internet. I'm not sure that's a good policy.
I clearly said no moral obligation. That covers your claim of Free Speech as a principle. A private organization does not owe you their bandwidth.
> then you're essentially saying that it's okay if it costs millions of dollars to speak freely on the internet.
No. Go buy a RaspberryPi for $35. Now you can host your own site and say whatever you would like on the internet. Again, nobody owes you anything. Nobody is obliged to carry my message. You have a right speak freely. You do not have a right to be heard.
> You have a right speak freely. You do not have a right to be heard.
"You have the right to speak freely as long as you can't effectively do it"? Not much of a right then, is it?
I wonder what would have happened to the civil rights movement or the women's right movement if people with that kind of attitude had existed back then? Those were widely opposed movements back then too.
> "You have the right to speak freely as long as you can't effectively do it"
That's a pretty gross misrepresentation of what I said. Think of it another way. Prior to the internet could TV and radio stations be forced to play an ad they disagree with? Could newspapers and magazines be forced to print ads or op-eds they disagree with?
You cannot force someone else to carry your message. If you are unable to broadcast the message yourself and nobody else is willing to broadcast it for you then that is your own issue. No private entity is responsible for giving you a platform.
A Raspberry Pi can be trivially overloaded with a simple DOS attack. (Not even DDOS.) If you've got anything remotely controversial to say, I wouldn't count on that being sufficient to keep your site online. The infrastructure necessary to remain online during a coordinated attack isn't cheap; that's why Cloudflare advertises DDOS protection as one of the many services they offer: https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/
Whether or not a cloud infrastructure company "owes" content-neutral treatment to their customers is a matter which, I think, is up for debate. Particularly in this day and age where the internet has become such an important venue for political speech.
