They are a good company, but that’s not the problem. The problem is the internet is increasingly got centralized behind them, to the point of blocking their IP addresses (or when they have an outage) broke a significant chunk of the internet. Also, once they control a significant chunk of internet, what’s stopping them from turning shitty like google (which famously started with a “don’t be evil” motto)? At that point it’s probably too late to decentralize the internet again.
Centralization is an issue, but it’s not Cloudflare to blame, it’s the ISPs and governing bodies. Consider this: who’s the one who initiated the initial block in the first place?
You only see one side of the coin (government broke a huge swath of the internet by blocking cloudlare’s IP addresses). Now consider the other side of the same coin: when cloudlare decided it doesn’t like your IP address, suddenly you’re blocked from accessing a huge swath of the internet. This isn’t hypothetical either. It’s already happening in places with IPv4 scarcities which forced ISP to put their customers behind CGNAT. Cloudlare see this as a single IP address generating huge amount of requests, and when it blocked that IP address, suddenly a huge amount of people are blocked from accessing a huge part of the internet and instead get the dreaded captcha hell. People from US and Europe haven’t seen this issue too often because they have disproportionate amount of IPv4 allocation compared to the rest of the world, but if you want to have a taste of what it’s like running afoul with cloudlare, just use TOR or a cheap/free VPN and see how many sites suddenly become inaccessible due to cloudflare deny rule.
I employ VPN, TOR, and additionally, I manage sites utilizing CloudFlare. I can tell you this much: There aren’t many alternative services that safeguard your website and gather statistics while respecting the privacy of the end user. CloudFlare even provides onion routes for TOR users, which I’ve naturally activated for my website. Thus, the issue doesn’t rest with CloudFlare; it’s a tool. The true issue lies with the webmasters abusing their power and using overzealous rulesets.
They could easily apply the same rulesets by utilizing nginx to proxy the traffic and implementing blocks on their side, avoiding CloudFlare altogether. The only distinction would be the increased expenses and a different host, nothing more.
Centralization is likely the unintended end result of the internet. Consider a mesh network where all the links have even throughput. Now suddenly one node has some content that goes viral. Everyone wants to access that data. Suddenly that node needs to support a link that’s much wider because everyone’s requests accumulate there.
Someone goes and upgrades that link. Well now they can serve many more other nodes so they start advertising to put others’ viral information on the node with larger link.
They are a good company, but that’s not the problem. The problem is the internet is increasingly got centralized behind them, to the point of blocking their IP addresses (or when they have an outage) broke a significant chunk of the internet. Also, once they control a significant chunk of internet, what’s stopping them from turning shitty like google (which famously started with a “don’t be evil” motto)? At that point it’s probably too late to decentralize the internet again.
Centralization is an issue, but it’s not Cloudflare to blame, it’s the ISPs and governing bodies. Consider this: who’s the one who initiated the initial block in the first place?
You only see one side of the coin (government broke a huge swath of the internet by blocking cloudlare’s IP addresses). Now consider the other side of the same coin: when cloudlare decided it doesn’t like your IP address, suddenly you’re blocked from accessing a huge swath of the internet. This isn’t hypothetical either. It’s already happening in places with IPv4 scarcities which forced ISP to put their customers behind CGNAT. Cloudlare see this as a single IP address generating huge amount of requests, and when it blocked that IP address, suddenly a huge amount of people are blocked from accessing a huge part of the internet and instead get the dreaded captcha hell. People from US and Europe haven’t seen this issue too often because they have disproportionate amount of IPv4 allocation compared to the rest of the world, but if you want to have a taste of what it’s like running afoul with cloudlare, just use TOR or a cheap/free VPN and see how many sites suddenly become inaccessible due to cloudflare deny rule.
I employ VPN, TOR, and additionally, I manage sites utilizing CloudFlare. I can tell you this much: There aren’t many alternative services that safeguard your website and gather statistics while respecting the privacy of the end user. CloudFlare even provides onion routes for TOR users, which I’ve naturally activated for my website. Thus, the issue doesn’t rest with CloudFlare; it’s a tool. The true issue lies with the webmasters abusing their power and using overzealous rulesets.
They could easily apply the same rulesets by utilizing nginx to proxy the traffic and implementing blocks on their side, avoiding CloudFlare altogether. The only distinction would be the increased expenses and a different host, nothing more.
Centralization is likely the unintended end result of the internet. Consider a mesh network where all the links have even throughput. Now suddenly one node has some content that goes viral. Everyone wants to access that data. Suddenly that node needs to support a link that’s much wider because everyone’s requests accumulate there.
Someone goes and upgrades that link. Well now they can serve many more other nodes so they start advertising to put others’ viral information on the node with larger link.