IPFS Censorship by Cloudflare
Back in September 2018, I wrote a post criticizing Cloudflare’s IPFS gateway, which they claimed would be ‘highly-reliable’ and ‘security-enhanced’. I argued that this claim is dubious, especially after the company’s CEO arbitrarily decided to take down a website they were supposed to be protecting. I pointed out that Cloudflare is trying to position themselves as a gatekeeper for decentralized alternatives to centralized services, much like Google and Facebook. If Cloudflare gained popularity and many users started using their gateway, they’d effectively be able to control what users can or cannot access on the IPFS network, which goes against the whole idea of IPFS as a peer-to-peer network without centralized control.
Cloudflare now admits to censoring content on IPFS in their latest “transparency report”. As Torrenfreak reports in “Cloudflare Disables Access to ‘Pirated’ Content on its IPFS Gateway” (March 24th 2023):
Cloudflare Disables IPFS Access
In its most recent transparency report, Cloudflare explains that it will respond to valid abuse requests by disabling access. This includes spam reports as well as copyright infringement complaints.
“Although Cloudflare does not have the ability to remove content on IPFS or Ethereum, Cloudflare may disable access through Cloudflare-operated gateways to certain content on IPFS and the Ethereum network in response to abuse reports, including reports of copyright, technical, and other abuse.”
“This action does not prevent access to that content through other gateways, which Cloudflare does not control,” Cloudflare clarifies.
In the first quarter of 2022, Cloudflare reports that this policy resulted in 1,073 IPFS actions. Presumably, this means that the company disabled access the same number of items on the IPFS network. No such actions were taken for the Ethereum gateway.
Turns out not trusting Cloudflare was a very smart thing to do after all.
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