CloudFlare CEO says his Daily Stormer takedown was “arbitrary” and “dangerous”

Enlarge / Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince at a 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt conference in London. (credit: Anthony Harvey/Getty Images for TechCrunch)

Until recently, CloudFlare prided itself on its unwavering commitment to free speech. Even when he was criticized for providing service to alleged terrorist groups in 2013, CEO Matthew Prince stood firm, insisting that "a website is speech. It is not a bomb."

So a lot of people were surprised on Wednesday when the company abruptly changed its tune and canceled the account of the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. The action seemed to fly in the face of everything CloudFlare claimed to believe as recently as May.

And in an internal company e-mail obtained by Gizmodo, Prince acknowledged that the decision was exactly as arbitrary as it seemed.

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