But a week later, I continue to worry about this power and the potential precedent being set. The reality of today’s internet is that if you are publishing anything even remotely controversial, your site will get cyberattacked. Without a massive global network similar to Cloudflare’s, it is nearly impossible to withstand the barrage. Only a small group of companies—names you know, like Facebook , Google and Microsoft , along with a handful of others you may not, like Cloudflare—have sufficient scale to keep their users online.

The upshot is that a few private companies have effectively become the gatekeepers to the public square—the blogs and social media that serve as today’s soapboxes and pamphlets. If a handful of tech executives decide to block you from their services, your content effectively can’t be on the internet.