CloudFlare CEO: “The people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes”

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

Until recently, CloudFlared 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 the company claimed to believe as recently as May.

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