Cloudflare Defeats Lawsuit over Nonconsensual Intimate Imagery
A federal court dismissed a lawsuit against Cloudflare over nonconsensual intimate imagery (NCII) posted on Facebook, ruling that the company is protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The court found that Cloudflare's caching and content delivery services did not make it a publisher of the harmful content, shielding it from liability for the third-party posts.
Background
- Cloudflare is a major internet infrastructure company: it provides CDN, DDoS protection, and reverse-proxy services. It does not host content, but sits between website servers and visitors.
- NCII (Nonconsensual Intimate Imagery), often called "revenge porn," is sexually explicit material shared without the subject's consent.
- This lawsuit asked whether an infrastructure provider (not a host like Facebook) can be liable when users access NCII through its network. The court said no: Cloudflare is shielded by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the key US law protecting online services from liability for third-party content.
- The ruling matters because plaintiffs increasingly try to sue middle-layer services (CDNs, domain registrars, DNS providers) to cut off content at the infrastructure level. This decision reaffirms broad immunity for passive network intermediaries.