> 5) A report by CloudFlare competitor Akamai found that the percentage of legitimate e-commerce traffic originating from Tor IP addresses is nearly identical to that originating from the Internet at large. (Specifically, Akamai found that the "conversion rate" of Tor IP addresses clicking on ads and performing commercial activity was "virtually equal" to that of non-Tor IP addresses).
This point seems rather odd. I'm not following the connection between a large percentage of Tor requests being malicious and the fact that Tor users have almost the same conversion rate. Malicious requests are coming from botnets and/or fraudsters. They're, for the most part, not in the subset of Tor users which click ads or do anything else that would be tracked as part of a site's conversion rate. What's funny about this is that the linked report even confirms that requests from exit nodes are far more likely to be malicious:
Tor exit nodes were far more likely to contain malicious requests:
• 1:11,500 non-Tor IPs contained malicious requests
• 1:380 Tor exit nodes contained malicious requests
I'm a huge supporter of Tor and have been running a relay node for years, but it seems their stance on this topic is quite fundamentalist and they chose to ignore any arguments or facts that they don't like while basically grasping at straws in their counterarguments.
It's okay to be concerned about CloudFlare having such a huge market share. They're a huge target for nation states and others alike. Global passive¹ adversaries are a problem for things like Tor, and they might very well be forced to become one at some point. It's essential to have more competition in this area, and that's a fair argument to make. However, with regards to how they're handling Tor, I don't think there's anything wrong with what they're doing, and the explanations presented in their blog post seemed sound to me.
¹ Or, rather, possibly an active adversary too?