 Hello, everyone. My name is Eric Goldman. I'm a professor of law at Santa Clara University School of Law, and today I'm talking with Matthew Prince, who is the CEO of Cloudflare, and I want to say thank you to Matthew for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Eric. Okay, what we're going to do is run through some scripted questions with maybe a little back and forth. Let me start with the softball. So why don't just tell me what Cloudflare is and why you founded it. So Cloudflare's mission to start out with is to help build a better internet, which is why when when you approach us for this project, it seemed right up right at the alley of things that we think about all the time. Well, we started the company, Michelle Zatlin, Lee Holloway, and I back in 2009, really realizing that first of all the world was moving from on-premise hardware and boxes that you would buy to services that were delivered in the cloud. And all of the things that you had had turned to in order to make sure that whatever you were doing online was secure. If everything moved to cloud, there was nowhere to sort of put a box or install software necessarily to help protect you. And so what we decided to do was build out a giant network, which would allow our customers, which are everything from, you know, individual developers or small businesses up to some of the largest internet properties and companies online to use our network in order to be, you know, three things. First and foremost, secure. Fix some of the underlying bugs of the internet to make it more secure. Secondly, reliable. And make sure that if somebody drops an anchor in the Mediterranean and cuts a piece of fiber optic cable that your website doesn't go offline. Basically, we can route around all of those problems and make sure that you stay reliable and stable all the time. And then, and lastly fast, we wanted to make sure that that you were as fast as possible. I think over time, there are a couple of other things that we've that we've added to that sort of two other pillars. One is private. It's turned out that as we have thought about our business, we really think that privacy is a real key of both security and and what what people are looking for in the internet, and then also efficient, which, which really translates into how do we make sure that the internet is available to everyone everywhere in the world, whether you're a person who's creating content and wants to reach a global audience, or you're part of that global audience and you're and you're somewhere, you know, in sub Saharan Africa or or Latin America or somewhere that you might not have the best internet access. We want to do what we can to make sure that the internet is available to everyone. Super. So when I think about the internet ecosystem. Sometimes we talk about layers in a telecom stack. We talk a lot through a little bit. We think about a hierarchy of different activities there's people sometimes called edge providers or websites or online services are available that are facing the end user. And then there's hosts for those services that actually provide the servers and the cloud that are necessary for those edge providers to communicate with their users. And then there's the internet access providers that connect the servers to the rest of the internet. And then there's the physical layer the actual hardware that moves all that data that is that forms the internet. Can you tell me a little bit about where cloudflare fits in that telecom stack or how you think about it in a different way. Yeah, you know, I tend to think about it. Maybe from the perspective of of where is sort of the ultimate responsibility for the content, which is which is flowing so I think it maps somewhat to what you what you said but but I haven't, I haven't somewhat a slightly different take on some of them. I think it all starts with an individual at some level, whenever there's content which is created online there's an individual that's that's creating that content. I guess in some future world it might be an AI or something else but today you know it's largely the individual and and in a perfect world individuals would have that responsibility for that content and responsibility for the laws and and and norms and the laws that that exists around the world under that individual would be sort of the platform that that is is helping promote organize distribute the content so that could be a, it could be a Facebook or a Twitter or WordPress, you know that is actually providing a structure that is is is distributing and organizing and and making available the content that's online below that. And this is where it maps it to what you said is I think of it as being like the hosting provider. In some cases like a Facebook, they are both the host and and the platform itself but you know in a lot of other cases you might have two different organizations that would be responsible for that. And I would think of there as being kind of the networks that connect everything together. And then below that would be some of the sort of foundational and fundamental internet protocols and technologies that have to exist to make make things make things work. And what's interesting about us is is I think we would sort of most naturally say that we're sort of that network layer, but I think that we have certain products that are up in that hosting layer, and we have certain products that are sort of down in that more fundamental internet layer so something like domain registration, which it which feels like it's a very, very, very foundational aspect to how anything works and and ultimately, you know the registrar of your domain. I think it should be at the kind of the very bottom of the stack of people who's responsible for for that content. And so as we think about what our role is online, we sort of, we have, we think about it very much on a product by product basis, because we have certain products where we're actually the host, and I think that in those cases, we have more responsibility for the content that is on those products we have other products where we're just the domain registrar we're just the DNS provider. So in those cases, we're sort of further down the stack and I would be more reticent to be taking sort of an editorial or any kind of kind of content control role on that. But for most of our products I think we sit sort of squarely in that in that network provider. So I'm not sure exactly how that that that's that's sort of how that's my taxonomy of how I sort of think about the world. And at one level the way I think it's almost like, it's almost like a Django blocks stacked on top of each other, where, you know, you, you, you want to sort of do the least harm possible or you want to have the sort of the most narrow impact possible as as you're making content decisions like at some point you pull out the domain registrar you pull out the network, then everything above that is is tricky we have lots of platforms or hosts that use us as customers. And so we're always very reticent to be making policy decisions on behalf that that that would affect those hosts before they have a chance or those platforms before they have a chance to take action themselves and so I think in an ideal you sort of start at the top and work your way down. But but again, that's that's that's sort of how we we sort of frame frame the conversation is how we think through some of these policy issues. And I actually that's a helpful framing for the rest of our discussion so I'm happy to work with it. We think about something like section 230. It makes it very clear, the individual is the person is accountable for their actions, and then everyone else below that individual in your community is absolved of liability for the conduct or content of that individual. And so, but what we're also seeing is a lot of pressure put to push liability and editorial decisions deeper and deeper into the taxonomy that you described and I guess one of the unanswered questions of our day is how deep should it go. You know, should it stop with the individual and everyone else is absolved or do we say, maybe the closer they are but not the individual themselves, we're going to push a responsibility further to them. You know, I, I would love there to be a bright line. I'm not sure that there, there always is a bright line. I think I deal again ideally the individuals would take that responsibility but there are some bad individuals in the world that do illegal things using platforms. And in that case, you know, the platform probably has a responsibility to, to make sure that they are doing what they can to, to deal with that that content. I think, you know, whether that's what the law says now in the United States or not around the world I think just, you think about it from first principles. Like you want to have as narrow a impact as possible, but you at the same time when we all agree that there is some societal harm and there are some things that we could, we could, you know, totally agree on are just terrible societal harms that that you probably do because the individual doesn't take responsibility you want some layer lower in the stack to take that responsibility, but I think you kind of work down that process in order you don't want to skip down to the, the lower layers if if one of our responsible, you know, platform providers or hosting providers. If all of a sudden we effectively yank the rug out from under them, then you know their first phone call is, Well, how can I, how can I trust you in this and in fact when we have made decisions in the past to shut down. You know, particular customers, one of the very first things that we get are very legitimate responsible large platforms that use us, calling us and saying well how can we be sure that you're not going to do the same thing to us someday. And I think that's actually a really reasonable question to ask and I think for us it's pretty, it's pretty straightforward there's a there's a big difference between, you know, an entire hosting provider which is dedicated to, you know, illegal content. And, you know, someone who, you know, someone who's a totally responsible host or a platform that, you know, takes no responsibility actually, you know, works hard to undercut sort of the enforcement of law enforcement legitimate law enforcement actions and other things versus those that you know are again part of the sort of a social social contract. And so, as we think about it, you know, again starts with the individual, but there will be some times, and actually probably pretty frequently that bad individuals will need to get police by the platforms that they use. It will become much rarer that the underlying hosts will have to, will have to police the platforms, maybe rarer much rarer still that a provider like cloudflare will have to police the hosts, and, and then hopefully we don't get to a point because I think there are some really significant consequences where you deny fundamental internet technologies for all but you know the most egregious content is you almost never get to the point there where you say DNS is cut off for everyone or domain registration is cut off for everyone. Those seem like that that seems like the kind of foundation on which all of the rest of the internet is built, and it seems very dangerous. If we start tinkering with that on a policy or editorial basis. Well, mine's being the old soap of battles which are coming up on their decade anniversary where in fact, Congress was, you know, just a whisper hair away from imposing liability at the domain name register level. I would have very foundationally obviously changed how the internet works and, and, and again I think that the challenge is that you know if you if you deny someone the ability to register domain, that is a global impact, and one of the biggest questions that that has been a real surprise. In retrospect of starting clubflare is how diverse the policies are around the world you know when we when we launched the company back in in 2010. The day we launched we had customers in 10 countries around the world. By the end of the first month, we had customers in literally every customer in every country on earth and we only had eight employees. And so the challenges of figuring out how you think through what the different policy decisions are around the world are are are difficult and the more that you can, again, confine that to something which is closer to a local provider again, ideally the individual, but then maybe whatever the platform is that is servicing that local community or the hosting provider that servicing maybe a slightly larger community. You know by the time you start to get to us, you're you start to have impacts that that are much broader. And, and again I think that's contrary to a lot of how you know the internet was was formed in the beginning, and when you get down to traditional technologies like DNS or domain registration, you know, those tend to only be able to be applied on a global basis. And it's, it's actually a fairly small list of content that on a global basis we can all agree should just you know disappear from the internet. So that almost romanticized scenario where you've got eight employees servicing a truly global customer base. You said that you didn't anticipate that going in and what the policy consequences would be from that. Was there something you would do differently because now knowing that you're going to have to navigate this more ass of divergent or heterogeneous laws. I actually think I mean there are lots of things that would have done differently in the beginning of Cloudflare although I think the one of the things where we were better prepared than most was on some of the understanding that the complications and consequences of these really really hard policy issues I remember, you know, about 18 months after it gets actually a little bit less than that 14 months after we launched. One day, you know the FBI showed up at our office with two national security letters, and, and, and, and, and you know we did that you're not allowed to talk about them which is, which is, which is arguably a violation and there's no check and balance there they're entirely administered by the executive branch which is, which is arguably a due process violation. And, and I think that, you know, it was, I think that had I not, you know, I often wonder whether the three years I spent in law school were worthwhile but then I remember moments like that, where, you know, I had to I think there was a courage or gall or, or hubris to go to our board and say you know what we're going to do we're going to we're going to sue the federal government. And, and I, and so I actually think that, you know, at some level, we were really thinking through a lot of these policy, I mean that the question that we would always ask ourselves when we were eight people above a nail salon in Palo Alto, California, was if we were doing the entire internet, what would be the right policy decision. And, and I think that that helped us from a very early time, make some very difficult decisions around around the policy decisions and, and make them optimized for what is the long term best interest of, of really the internet as a whole. And, and so, so I, so, so there are a ton of things I would have done differently on the technical perspective on the technical side, and, and go to market and and all kinds of other things but I actually am proud of how thoughtful and long term oriented we've been on the on the policy side and, and, and it's part of what I am still enjoying most about about about my job and about working the company. I think that's an issue about bad individuals, and what should be done about them. And we can focus on your DDoS service, I think that's the purest way the question arises. When I think about your DDoS service I think about a service that's designed to protect good actors from bad actors. But what if the person that Cloudflare is protecting is itself a bad actor. And I guess there's a second order question there. How would Cloudflare or anyone else know that they're a bad actor. But can you talk me through a little bit about this, this dilemma that I'm, I'm having with this idea, you know, when it's protecting bad actors from other bad actors versus protecting the good actors from bad actors. There are certain cases where it's pretty easy. So, you know, if we're a US based company that there are, there are certain entities in the United States that are subject to sanctions rules and requirements. And so, you know, if, if somebody tries to sign up and they are a, you know, a terrorist organization or, or, or, you know, a sort of greed on by the United States government as as a sanctioned party, then we don't provide our services to them and that's and that's that's pretty straightforward it gets sometimes a little complicated if they sort of hide their identity and other things but I think that's one of those places where, you know, we have over time gotten much more sophisticated about about identifying that. You know, I think the harder time comes when it is a, an organization that is, you know, either doing something that that seems bad, you know, so so an example in the DDoS space was, excuse me, the number of the services that you can actually hire to launch DDoS attacks against against other customers. They, they, they at times like what the way that they would deal with rivals is they would launch DDoS attacks against each other. And, and so, you know, they would all sign up for cloud, the free version of Cloudflare in order to, you know, make sure that they were protected from each other kind of knocking each other out. There's a, there's a security journalist, a guy named Brian Krebs who I actually really, really admire and think highly of but we have we have gotten in sort of knock down drag out fights where he's, he basically is advocating kind of the Mad Max kind of future challenges that the way that you could solve the DDoS problem is that you would basically just drop protection for all the DDoS services and they would all fight against each other and kill each other. You know, I think that there's, there's some problems, you know, if you study Nash Equilibrium and things that that actually what you might end up with is much, much stronger, more menacing more evil DDoS services, but that that was one of those early sanctions and I remember it came up for us in, in early 2011 when Lollsack with the hacker group signed up for us and again Cloudflare is the free version of our service and we don't screen people, you know, accepting sanctions lists and other things before before they sign up, and back in 2011 we weren't we weren't particularly sophisticated about that. But they signed up and I remember all of a sudden, like, you know, you had thousands of people who were screaming at us, saying, you know, how can you possibly have this hacker group that is is using our services and, and we often find ourselves kind of on our back foot where we don't know what we've never even heard of the hacker group and any people on Twitter or email or whatever are yelling at us about about this or that or the other. And so the challenge and again I this isn't this isn't an excuse but but one of the challenges I think is that, you know, when you're talking to people, how you can be an expert on, not only every hacker group in the world but, you know, when, when pop vote dot hk signs up, and how do you, how do you know that that's the Hong Kong democracy movement. And then in that case when you get, you know, an order from the Chinese government say taking it down, what do you do when, you know, when, when, when, when, you know, free Catalonia, you know, signs up how do you have the expertise on on that that's the independent site and all of the political ramifications that they come behind that when, when, when, you know, when an independent journalist in, in Ukraine signs up, how can you know that that's you know the center of the conflict in Crimea and, and again today I think that we have, even though we're still a relatively small organization, we have a lot more of that sophistication and expertise but but you know every one of those questions that I just sort of outlined as hypotheticals came up for us when we had less than 30 employees. And, and so, you know, I think that that it is hard to, and even having lived through it it's hard to wrap your head around how global technology companies that really take off become almost instantaneously and and and asking, asking on them to say, you know, be not only technology experts but policy experts, especially what early in their in their history is a pretty tall order, and a pretty big ask, if we do ask that, then, you know, that that that's that's great for us. That means that there will be no, you know, disruptive cloud flare new service that comes along. Because, you know, if, and yet we now have the resources to have the policy people and have the, the government relations team and have those things and, and ahead of us will be you know the Facebook's and Google's and Microsoft's of the world. So, you know, I think one of the things that the one of the challenges here is how do you start to think about what are the right responsibilities that you put in place for organizations for larger organizations, but then how do you still allow kind of a new a new place to to be able to compete and that's, it's a that that is that is that that that's that's that's above my pay grade so hopefully hopefully you and the people watching and thinking about it. Well, certainly a question that I think our project has to grapple with, because it's no doubt that's where the tenor the conversation is. I want to come back to this kind of navigating the politics question in a moment but if you indulge me, I do want to talk about daily storm or a situation, and my own personal take is that I thought that the letter that you wrote when you pulled a plug on the daily stormer was really I thought a great piece of transparency. You were laying bare for us, you're making a decision, you didn't want to make the decision you told us why you didn't want to make the decision. And so you really laid out I think kind of the whole story behind it where usually in a calm situation like that is a single positive narrative, or you say as little as possible and get the hell out of there. So I thought it was really a helpful artifact in internet history to see you lay out your thinking. And if you don't indulge me I do want to read one piece of it that you wrote law enforcement legislators and courts have the political legitimacy and predictability to make decisions on what content should be restricted companies should not. Let me through a little bit about how the daily stormers encapsulation of these dynamics that we've been discussing about, you know, when you're dealing with someone who might have gone from being a unknown actor to maybe a bad actor and when you say, Okay, they're no longer eligible for our services where we need to protect against them they're no longer the ones we should be protecting. So, starting with transparency when we think of what are sort of the core values of Cloudflare and your core values have to be things that would differentiate you from from other companies so obviously we want to be a place that's fair and reasonable and people can do their best work and are awarded for the work they do and, and, you know, we're, and we encourage a diverse workplace and all those things but one of the things I think are different about Cloudflare I think we are a real curious organization. We're always always taking on new challenges always always looking at new things I think we're a very principled organization we'll talk a little bit more about about some of that. But and I think we're also just a radically transparent organization both internally and externally. And, and it's interesting because I think one of the biggest mistakes that technology companies have and I think that there's a, there's almost DNA that goes back to probably at least fair child semiconductor and, and, and maybe, maybe even before that of kind of a just relentless secrecy, which is almost pathological at most companies, and where, you know, if you if you were privileged to get to sit in the policy meetings at a, at a Facebook or a Google or an Apple, like, it's not like they're surprised by how hard these issues are. It's, they have very nuanced conversations about about these things. What I think they mistakenly do is that they don't actually share why these decisions are hard they say, you know, we kick them off because they violated, you know, paragraph 13 g of our terms of service well the terms of service and again it's not, it's not automatically executed there's still some discretion from the company behind that and and I think what's been missing in a lot of this is the conversation about how hard these issues are what you know if if I if I go back to the daily stormer. So first of all the daily stormer was a, you know, I mean, the way of describing at one level, and it was that they were a bunch of neo Nazis I think that more accurately they were a bunch of, you know, really internet trolls who were, you know, if, if, if, you know, loving white kittens had been an offensive thing you could have done on online they would have loved white kittens they they just literally were looking for whatever the most offensive thing was, in part because they were just attention seeking around it at least it seemed seemed to us that doesn't mean that it wasn't incredibly damaging was incredibly distasteful. It was not an organization we were proud to have, you know, using using our services. And if we thought about it of from the perspective of if Cloudflare ran the entire internet, you know, should they be on the internet or not. Like it felt like it was, that was a pretty, a pretty tough call for us for us to be to be making. It, you know, I think over the years, we had continued to see more and more times where, you know, some horrible thing would be using us and we'd get a call from a policymaker or a journalist who would say, you know, what, how are you thinking about this and why why aren't you kicking them 95% of the time we'd explain like hey here's here's where we sit in the stack we're different than Facebook or Twitter and and and we think about this way and that doesn't mean we don't have responsibility but but we think that it should sort of play out in the following in the following way and 95% of the time the policymaker the journalist would say yeah that makes total sense and we would say if it was a journalist would say well will you write an article that says you know that makes total sense and the journalist would say, you know, company does the right thing is not a story. And so we're not not going to write that. And yet, and policymakers would better generally like that makes the right thing but there's still this other thing in the corner that I hate and I want to figure out how to control it. And, and so what we saw was especially in Europe, that there was, you know, increasingly, kind of painting with a broad brush a tech companies need to do more to control bad content online and, and largely when you know those those policies were being written on the companies that that the policymakers were thinking about were, you know, Facebook and and Twitter and YouTube. But the way that the policies were written they were they were sometimes, you know, starting to creep into a point where we were getting worried that they might create some really undesirable consequences for us. And so all of that was the conversation that we were having kind of on one side and then and then on the other. And internally we said, you know, at some point we're going to have to kick someone off, and then talk about why that's that's dangerous and then right around kind of the point that we came to that conclusion. You know the Daily Stormer people just did some of the most repugnant things that you can imagine doing as a human being. And, and it you know if you're going to fire any customer firing neo Nazi customers is really fun so so we'd fired them, but then as you said we wrote very specifically about what the consequences were, and, and different than I think a lot of technology companies do. When journalists and policymakers, you know, across the political spectrum called us. We didn't say, you know, no comment. Instead we engaged and we talked about it and, and I spent, you know, the greater part of it of a year meeting with everyone from, you know, the Southern Poverty Law Center to the Cato Institute to European lawmakers and everyone in between, and, and sharing a little bit about who we were, but then also, you know, talking about what the various parts of the stack we're in. And I think that there were still plenty of people that sort of disagreed with what our general approach was. But I think people appreciated at least that we were transparent about it that we engaged that we listened, and then we thought about it, I think over time that those sets of conversations have evolved into, you know, the hierarchy of sort of individual platform in this network, foundational internet technology. And, and, and again I think we've gone from saying, you know, we would prefer to never kick anyone off to saying, Listen, we're, we're going to be a little bit more nuanced about that. If you have a bad individual, a bad platform and a bad host, then sometimes it might actually fall to us to take action but that should happen fairly rarely. And, you know, for better or worse, as there are laws around the world that compel us to take certain actions, then how can we make sure that as we take an action to satisfy the rules of, you know, China or Russia or India or Brazil or or or Canada or whoever it is, how do we make sure that the rules of that country don't extend beyond, beyond their borders. And, and I think that that's some, I think that that that had we not taken that action it, you know, a risk of, you know, having a manual count roll over in his grave. I mean, it was, if you're going to use someone for a means to an end a bunch of neo Nazis are pretty good, good folks to do that with but I think that we learned a lot. I think that it helped shape what have subsequently been more nuanced and technically understanding regulation that's developed since then. I don't think we're, we're out of the woods, I think we're gonna have to keep keep talking about, about these things. But, but I think that that is, I feel like we have gotten much more sophisticated in how we think about these policies in part, because we went through that that exercise. Yeah, and you had mentioned earlier that when you pull the plug on a customer rattles the confidence or trust of other customers. Did do you have that experience in this case or did your other customers say, finally, you know, but yes please more of that. Well, so two different stories. So, so one story, which is, which is probably the last principled one was that one of the things that was the final determination in in us, making a decision to kick this particular customer off was that one of our large customers said it's them or us. And, and, and that was not a comfortable, you know, conversation because we are we're a business and, and, you know, we have shareholders and, and, you know, we have responsibilities to them and, and at the end of the day, you know, sacrificing someone who's paying us nothing in this repugnant for someone who's paying us a lot and is, you know, a good organization. That that that was that was a that we don't love being in that situation but it was it put us in a hard place. What's interesting is the general counsel of that of that organization about six months later called me back and said I owe you an apology. And I said, Well, what are you talking about. And this person had just lived through another situation where this was a software company, and they had provided services in a way that a certain group of people found found offensive, and it blew up for a few days. And, and the general counsel said, you know, I thought that this was really straightforward but now having lived through it myself. I see that this is, is incredibly complicated and I think that, you know, that that that some, I don't, I don't envy anyone who has to live, live through these, these, these, these questions and consequences but, but I do, I do think that they are that they, that they, that they as we, as we as we politicize who customers are that that will have that will mean that as people want to deplatform customers that that are deplatform individuals that they will look at all of the different technologies that they rely on and find ways to say, you know, can we get the browser to block them can we get their payments processor to block them can we get their, you know, domain register to block them. And there are just so many different routes that if you get any of those things shut off and especially, you know, if you get that shut off, you know, you know, you know, you can think about whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, you know, but it, it certainly is a, is a thing with very significant consequences that we should that we should be thinking through. And that was basically the only customer that had given us that that conversation, almost everyone else when when we made it that the calls from our largest customers were, wait a second. You know, walk us through exactly how you did that and explain to us how we can be sure that you, you know what we think of as this infrastructure company is never are never going to do that to us again and so. And that's, you know, that's big, reliable, trustworthy, you know, financial institutions and, and, and big e-commerce platforms, and others, and, and not not internet trolls and not anyone who, who you would worry particularly about. And I think that that's something that much many more people were worried. You know, well, please make how can we ensure you won't use that that power against us as opposed to how do we make sure that you use that power more, more, more going forward. And I'd like to phrase that she is this politic, politicization, politicization, I don't think I can say that word politicization of customers. Because in the end, I think you're in the decisions that your company makes have political consequences, whether you want them or not, they seem unavoidable and so how do you navigate that environment when you, I think your preferred option will be don't involve me in the politics. And if that option is available now what we know it's it's really, it can get really hard in, in other ways so. So for instance, you know, we watched with with quite a bit of concern in the 2016 US election, as it became more and more clear that there were that there was foreign influence through disinformation and hacking campaigns. And, you know, internally, you know, a bunch of our team said is, is there, there must be something that we can do to help with these these sorts of issues and so we launched in, in, in early 2017 we launched something we call the Athenian project, which provides our services that no cost to any state local or, or, or, or county official that is helping administer elections in any way and you know we can't protect against everything we don't sit in front of the voting machines but you know we can help protect the website that you use to register to vote or or the, or the, the place that you go to figure out where your polling place is or the API that the district administrators will report back to vote results from. And, you know, and, and, and over the course of the four years between 2016 and 2020, more than half of US states and a majority of the, of the so called battleground states in the US signed up to use to use our services. And, and so, you know, one of the challenges is, if, if we were seen as, as political in any way, like we were leaning one direction or another. You know, whoever won or whoever lost the election could say, wow, we don't trust the election results because you know cloud flare, you know, was secretly behind the scenes, pushing one direction, or, or another. And so, you know, I think there are certain institutions and organizations in the world that we specifically require to be a political, and the voting process is, is, is one of them and having, you know, met with so many of the individuals that are that are charged on a on a local basis with administering elections now, you know, it's, that is an absolutely thankless, hard, but critically important job. And the, and the fact that again it is as a society at least in the United States have decided that that's a job that should be very apolitical for, for what I think that, that, that then suggests that there, there should be certain institutions and organizations that that it's incredibly important that they remain as apolitical as possible, whether or not, you know, as, as, as norms develop around, you know, various services whether that's, you know, Facebook's or, or hosting providers or network providers or, or domain registrars, whether the norms develop around that that that that are the same, or not, you know, I think, I think time will tell. One of the things that's tricky about all this is that, you know, the internet still in its absolute infancy, and it took us a really long time to figure out what were the norms around, you know, the printed word what were the norms around radio what were the norms around television what were the norms around, around, you know, that the telephone system, and then what are the ones you sort of figure out what those norms are what then are the appropriate laws that that follow that. I think we're still, you know, so so so early on that it's it's not clear whether because you know if today if I were talking on on on my my my phone and I and I said something, you know, incredibly racist or offensive. You know, and the phone operator, you know, dialed in and pulled the plug. That would be very, very strange. And so like, it doesn't seem right that the underlying network operator for the telephone would be making that choice. On the other hand, it seems totally reasonable and in fact it's the norm on a global basis that at least in the, in the time where newspapers were still, you know, thriving businesses, then in almost every major city globally. You would have two different newspapers that would represent the two sort of political extremes that that were there. And, you know, I think one of the, you know, one of the interesting questions is, you know, what what is, what is the natural state of sort of new new technology that comes along I was I was talking with them right before the 2016 election. I was talking to Julius Genakowski the former chair of the FCC and I was over at his house in DC and, and we were having a beer. And I said, Well, I've never seen anything like this in terms of this, you know, political contest and everything that's gone on around it. Do you, do you think that politics is ever going to get back to sort of how I remember it growing up, you know, watching the nightly news with with Tom Broca or Peter Jennings or whoever it was. And Julie said something that's really stuck with me over the years which is he's like, Why do you think that that's the natural order of things. He said that's a response to new technology and the new technology trying to keep itself from getting regulated, where in television emerges in the in the 40s and 50s. You know, it's such this incredibly profitable new technology that comes out, and it's limited to in the United States really just three different providers NBC ABC CDS. And like, they competed with each other a little bit, but what they were really worried about was how do you stave off regulation and so you know if you're going to create that as a business strategy. You know, what do you do you you hire every one of your anchors to have no accent and and you know be from the middle of the country and it's amazing if you actually look at the data, how many news anchors actually grew up in Kansas. You, you make sure that you cover every political convention from opening speech to balloon drop at the end which like three different networks covering the exact same thing is like the worst idea and yet to this day. The major network still cover, you know the political conventions from from beginning to end with basically the same, the same content and the same the same feeds. So you don't you don't oppose equal time loss as they as they get as they get proposed, because again you're what you're really trying to do is stave off regulation. That I think that if you then start to think about what are the platforms of today that have incredible value, and that have are trying like crazy to stay neutral whether that's Google with search and it's blows my mind that there isn't a Fox news search engine like right if Fox launched a search engine, it would have what 20% market share which is that on its own at you know $40 billion company. You know in the United States, and, and yet you know Google has done a great job at least with search of staying right down the center and yet you can start to see them getting pulled in either direction. So I think that search and the search results are inherently political. You know that Facebook is in the exact same place and if you think of Facebook is the modern newspaper. You know it really is quite remarkable that there isn't a conservative Facebook and a liberal Facebook the same way that that's that's happening around the rest of the world so I think that it is a. I'm not sure it's the natural state that you can stay neutral. I do think that there are certain institutions, like, like the, like the voting apparatus that we as a society have decided are so important that they have to be that way. I think there's some other technologies like the telephone system that have the norms have evolved to be that way. So if you look at you know what the natural state now of television where it's where it's obviously fractured into a million different channels or the natural state of newspapers which, you know, obviously fractured into into different different sides. I'm not, it'll be interesting to see how the sort of more editorial functions whether that search ranking or, or social media, how those, how those, whether they're able to stay neutral over over the long term. So I asked my last question to you, which I had already previewed and which you've already touched on, but knowing what you know now 12 years after the founding of Cloudflare. What would you do differently if you were to go back in time. Is there something that you've learned along the way that says, boy I really need to plan for a different scenario than what I thought I was. So, so it depends on on what what level. I think that one of the things that that has become a priority for us now which I wish had been a bigger priority early is is how do we figure out how to, you know, just not only reduce but but but make our impact on the environment. You know, much, you know, it literally negative the internet burns, you know, a huge amount of resources and energy resources, a lot of which is just wasted and I think it's, it's something that, you know, we have, we have only more recently realized how important that that is and I think that we're we're taking we're taking things to, you know, make kind of our carbon footprint. Negative that was the first thing that that sprung to mind because it's, it's something that really in the last 18 months has become internally a priority and it's something that could have been a bigger priority earlier in the company's history. I think from the policy perspective. I think we did a good job of engaging in in policy conversations early and I think we punched way above our weight. I wish you know you always can do more, and I wish that we'd done more I think the place that we have not paid enough attention to that that my hunch is is probably the most important region in the world for the future of internet policy and regulation is India. There used to be sort of two poles in sort of internet regulation there were sort of the Chinese way, and that you know for a long time the Chinese way it didn't totally make sense to me and then somebody described it in a way that that that really clicked which is they said, you know if you were launching a radio station or a TV station. You have to go to the FCC in order to get clearance for the spectrum. And there would be some what felt like somewhat arbitrary rules you know there are seven words you can't say on the air and if you break those rules they'll withdraw your spectrum license. You know that's just the exact that's the model for how China thinks about the internet which is, you know you have to apply for a license which is called my CP license in order in order to publish content inside of China. There are some rules that you have to follow if you don't follow the rules they withdraw your license and you and you disappear from the internet. And I think that that's actually, you know, there's some reasons that doesn't, you know, doesn't make sense to everyone but I think that if you just think about that as, oh it's they think of the internet the same way that the US thinks about radio or TV. It seems a little bit less foreign but you know that was one policy direction the other was the US policy direction which know it's hard to overstate how radically libertarian the US view of freedom of expression is and you know I grew up as part of it my dad was a journalist for part of his career and and you know we talked about the First Amendment and all that around around the dinner table so so it seems like it works pretty well to me but but but it is a radical radical radical experiment, and it is not the majority opinion around the world and so what's been amazing about the internet is it basically took the US approach to freedom of expression and exported it globally which obviously is been very disruptive to a lot of a lot of businesses and a lot of institutions around the world. I think that unfortunately that the world is is is not going to continue to accept kind of the US view of internet regulation going forward and even the US might not have the except the US view of internet regulation. I don't think that people, most countries around the world are quite ready to go to the full Chinese version and that the horse is sort of out of the barn in most places so it's hard to hard to put it back in. But I think the world is looking for what that new model is, and, and I think Europe, you know, is has got a bunch of things but it sort of doesn't have doesn't have the sort of cohesion to sort of figure it out. Brazil has the sort of gravitational mass but has has a number of other things that they're that they're focused on. I think India is the other country that is is going to really maybe set what the new standard is for internet regulation and I think that that's something that, you know, on one hand, you know, it's, it's amazing that it's a, it's, it's a, it's a very high functioning democracy and has has very strong freedom of expression rights. On the other hand it's been, you know, had a lot of concerning rules and regulations over the year around encryption and, and, and other things and so. So I think that's a place where I think we have under invested as a as a as an organization, and maybe as a, as a, as a group of people who are thinking about internet policy, and I think watching what happens in India and where and where India goes is something that we're we're spending more time thinking about and I and I would encourage is as people want if people who are interested in sort of the future of internet regulation to spend time watching watching what happens there. And indulge me on that last point though, is there something that Cloudflare or a broader set of internet services could have done that would have staved off the potential crisis that we might experience in India where I'm very troubled about the rules of the government's adopting. But it was that avoidable or is that was that always inevitable, we just got here now. Yeah, you know, you wonder what. So, so, you know, that I guess it may be a different way of asking the question would be, is there any way that the world could have just continued on the path of sort of following the, the US model of of internet regulation is, which is largely and you know anything goes model. And, and I think that that's some, you know, I'm not sure that that's a stable place for for for this I think that the internet such a incredibly disruptive force for traditional organizations that, that, yeah, you know, episode four of Star Wars was seem pretty optimistic but episode five is the Empire strikes back and I think we are, we have lived through episode four and we're going into episode five and and and you know governments and regulators around the world are definitely going to strike back. And I think that, again, I think that that is to some extent, a result of of, you know, a number of sort of just accesses that that that that have happened online. It is is also a result of, you know, imposing what was, again, a radically libertarian view of freedom of expression on on a world that that doesn't necessarily accept it like you know I often get sort of just as being, you know, the term when people want to criticize me they're like Matthews a free speech absolutist and I'm like I'm not free speech absolutes at all I think I'm probably a due process absolutist but but but I do think that it's hard. You know if you go to to German, you know, policymakers and you, and they say we know we'd like you to control neo Nazi content in Germany, and you say well what about the First Amendment, you know, they're polite if they don't roll their eyes. But but they say listen, if they're polite they'll say listen, we understand that that is part of your tradition and part of your history, but please understand that we have a very different tradition, because we had a very different history, and I think you have to respect that at at some at some level, and. And so, you know what I what I hope is what I hope is that you know we were sort of over here, what I hope is we certainly don't swing all the way to sort of the, you know, Chinese FCC, everything has to have a license view of Internet regulation globally. Again, I think that would be difficult to put the horseback in the barn, but I think that there might be a lot of things that that that start to control that. And the question, you know how how you might have avoided that. I don't know. I think that's a question that's worth, it's worth asking, and, and it's one that. And again, I think it's what what I'm encouraged by is that you know when we kicked a bunch of neo Nazis off in it in a somewhat arbitrary way. A lot of newspapers, prominent newspapers in Germany wrote neo Nazis are bad, but I'm not sure that, you know, Matthew Prince or this low level network thing we've we've never heard of should be the one making making that determination and so I think that if governments do, you know, have very transparent processes and if they do follow, you know what when the US we call the process what around the rest of the world you'd call rule of law. I actually think that that I'm optimistic that while we might go through sort of a transition time that as long as there's transparency, accountability and consistency which are sort of the foundational pillars of any any system of law that that we probably come out of this in a way which is where the internet looks more like it did over the last 30 years then, then where the sort of worst case scenarios have have looked at it in the in the in the last little bit while there again have been some some some real challenges the internet has created, you know I think none of us, none of us can underestimate the amount of good that it's done and it's and it's actually important for us to all continue to remind people that that that, like, I mean, can you imagine how much worse this pandemic would have been if it happened just 10 years earlier it's, we're able we were able that it was obviously still a horrible event for humanity but, but a lot of people were able to continue to connect with their loved ones get work done, you know, go about their daily lives in part because the internet continue to work and and and I think I'm hopeful that that that that maybe that's that's one of the things that we'll remember and and will help us fight to preserve you know what what it is we've created. Well, I always love ending on a note of optimism and you gave more than I would have expected so there's anything else you want to add now that's great otherwise I think we'll we'll say thank you. So the one thing I would ask is that whenever you write about the internet no matter what the AP says, capitalize it, because if I have to point to period a point in time, when it all started to go wrong. It was when the AP said I think in 2016 that you could now lowercase the internet. And you know I think what's amazing about the internet is that is a network of networks and there is only one. And so I think it being a proper noun is important and so I have my little tiny crusade on the side is capitalized if you care about the internet capitalizing. I feel like you can truly tell the internet's old guard by those who still capitalize the internet. I'm one of them sounds like you are too, but we are a dying breed. So I think we, Eric, we, you and I have to lead that that campaign on on, you know, cat if you if you care about the internet capitalize it so