Policing customers

In yesterday’s post about Cloudflare and Spamhaus Fazal comments that Cloudflare may have been asked by law enforcement to leave the website up.
This does happen and it’s not totally out of the question that’s what is going on with this particular website. But I used the malware C&C as an example of the poor behaviour condoned by Cloudflare, it’s certainly not the only bad behaviour. There’s also the issue that Cloudflare disavows all responsibility for the behaviour of their customers.

CloudFlare is a pass-through network provider that automatically caches content for a limited period in order to improve network performance. CloudFlare is not a hosting provider and does not provide hosting services for any website.
We do not have the capability to remove content from the web. If your submission is found to be legitimate, you will be directed to the appropriate provider for your report. Only reports of URLs resolving to CloudFlare IPs will be reviewed and appropriately handled. Cloudflare Abuse Policy

This doesn’t sound like the abuse policy of a network that actually is interested in policing their customers.

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In the email space, though, all too many companies just shrug off complaints. They don’t really pay attention to what recipients are saying and treat complaints merely as unsubscribe requests. Their whole goal is to keep complaints below the threshold that gets them blocked at ISPs. To be fair, this isn’t as true with ESPs as it is with direct senders, many ESPs pay a lot of attention to complaints and will, in fact, initiate an investigation into a customer’s practice on a report from a trusted complainant.
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