The terrifying power of internet censors

With only a few firms in this business, the consequences can be serious

After the white-nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, last month where a man drove a car into a crowd, killing a counter-demonstrator, the American neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer published a long, hate-riddled post mocking the victim.

Outcry over the article led its domain registrar, GoDaddy, to end The Daily Stormer’s service. The site then registered with Google, which also quickly cancelled its hosting. It wasn’t until Cloudflare, a website security and performance service, dropped the site as a client that The Daily Stormer truly lost its ability to stay online.

Because of the precise nature of Cloudflare’s business and the scarcity of