Now, after the man arrested for the El Paso shooting allegedly used 8chan to post his white supremacy Manifesto, service providers have said enough is enough.

This week’s Tech Tent podcast, we look at 8chan’s attempts to go back online and ask whose job it should be – if anyone-to decide which sites should be banned from the Internet.

8chan’s fame has long sparked calls for its eviction from the Internet.

They grew louder after an account believed to belong to the man behind the Christchurch, New Zealand, massacre published an 87-page Manifesto full of invective against immigrants and Muslims.

Then over the weekend, as news broke of the El Paso shooting-cheered by some of 8chan’s residents – the pressure on companies providing services on the site intensified.

Even the site’s founder said enough was enough. Fredrick Brennan, who cut ties to 8chan in 2018, told the BBC that the current owner should pull the plug.

“I feel like it has to stop,” he said.

“I feel like they are not working 8chan properly … they’re not trying to stop these shootings, at least they’re not trying hard enough.”

In a YouTube video, 8chan’s current owner Jim Watkins said he has worked with law enforcement and is complying with the law.

But one of the service providers keeping the site online disagreed.

On Sunday, Cloudflare – which protects 8chan and thousands of other organizations from denial of service attacks-dropped 8chan. The Bulletin Board quickly disappeared from the public network.

It was a quick turnaround. Just the day before, Cloudflare said ending the relationship with 8chan would be “problematic.”

In a somewhat tortured blogpost, cloudflare chief Executive Matthew Prince admitted that the company felt ” incredibly uncomfortable playing the role of content arbiter.”

He warned that 8chan will likely find a way to get back online very soon, just as the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer was when Cloudflare evicted him a few years ago.

So far, however, it seems the 8chan team’s efforts to find a new home have been unsuccessful.

On Thursday, a system administrator tweeted: “8chan is still down. Our machines have been DDoSed (affected by distributed denial of service attacks) one by one.”

Later came this: “8chan is the first platform to be de-platformed. We’re working hard to make sure that doesn’t happen again after we get back online.”

There were many supportive messages underneath the tweets. Watch out for a good fight, said one. Clearly, there is an audience waiting to reconnect with a community that allows the sharing of hateful ideas.

But figuring out at what stage – if ever-such communities should be driven offline is not easy.

Poppy Gustafsson, co-CEO of cybersecurity firm Darktrace, tells Tech Tent that web services companies face a difficult dilemma.

“Every business has a choice of who it does or does not deal with … but who should be regulated on the wider Internet that should not be for individual businesses to decide .”

A lot depends on where the site and its support services are located.

In the United States, with its First amendment protections of free speech, there will always be more reluctance to shut down anything that is not illegal.

There are no global rules about what is allowed on the Internet – and many might argue that they would be a very bad idea.

So it is likely that 8chan or its replacements will be returned to the network soon, due to commercial decisions rather than any made by regulators.