One of the last customer-generating corporations offering its neo-Nazi site, the Daily Stormer, has now abandoned it as a customer.
Security firm Cloudflare, which in the past provided the site with DDoS attack coverage and functionality optimization, canceled its paid subscription Wednesday, according to CEO Matthew Prince, who spoke with The Verge. Cloudflare did not roll back several requests for comment from the motherboard.
“It’s my resolution, I don’t think it’s CloudFlare’s policy and I think it’s an incredibly damaging resolution in many ways,” Prince said on the verge. “I think, like the Internet, we want to have a verbal exchange about where the right position is for content restriction … but there’s no way we can have this verbal exchange until we solve this specific problem.”
The Daily Stormer’s technical director, Andrew Auernheimer, told Motherboard that he had heard that the company had to remove the site after receiving an avalanche of email complaints.
“They’ll leave you if you send a lot of emails,” Auernheimer, also known by his nickname Weev, said in an email. “This is for an anti-ddos society.”
The move comes after domain provider GoDaddy, email provider Zoho, Google and other Internet domain corporations left the neo-Nazi site earlier this week for publishing an article mocking Heather Heyer, who was killed Saturday at the White Nationalists March in Charlotte, Virginiasville.
The Daily Stormer then moved to the dark internet, where it faced a DDoS attack. He has now returned to the Internet surface under an Arrayru domain, officially making it a Russian website (although it still turns out to be its dark internet presence).
Before Wednesday, Cloudflare remained the top-generation company, retaining the Daily Stormer as a customer, even amid new criticism.
Cloudflare has chosen to stay impartial about the type of content its consumers post in the past. “An online page is speech. It’s not a bomb. There is no imminent danger that it creates and no provider has a positive legal responsibility to monitor and the theoretically destructive nature of the speech possibly containing a site,” CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a 2013 blog post. “Fundamentally, we are consistent in the fact that our political ideals will not change color, allowing us to be fast and secure on the web,” he continued.
The security firm’s decision to ditch the Daily Stormer appears to have rattled other Cloudflare customers known for attracting white supremacists—like Twitter-like platform Gab.ai. Andrew Anglin, the Daily Stormer’s founder, sung the praises of Gab.ai on the platform Tuesday. “Gab is the last home of free speech on the internet,” he wrote.
On his official Twitter account, the site, favored through members of the alternative right, told Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who supported free speech and complied with the law, in a public attempt to ensure that he continued to gain advantages from Cloudflare services.
The resolution of leaving Cloudflare’s Daily Stormer comes at a tumultuous time for the site. Also on Wednesday, comic Dean Obeidallah filed a lawsuit in a federal court opposed to the site for publishing an article in June falsely alleging that Obeidallah was the Manchester bombing, which killed 23 others in May.
Twitter took strong action against the Daily Stormer on Wednesday and deleted several accounts related to it, according to messages posted through Auernheimer on Gab.io.
Several corporations such as Facebook, Discord, GoFundMe and Squarespace also took competitive steps to ban white nationalist content this week.