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Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

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Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#4

Post by vmoore »

> In an era where the internet is becoming increasingly important, it's crucial that governments ensure that companies like Cloudflare are not able to use their power to limit access to information or censor speech

Cloudflare should be seen as an ISP. An ISP is neutral and doesn't care about what content flows through its network. My only gripe is Cloudflare has to /store/ content on its servers, so it's not really an ISP in the traditional sense.

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#6

Post by nabla9 »

Cloudflare has pushed against public sentiment and mildly against the government to restrict censorship. They would want nothing more than be just "delivery infrastructure" part of the internet.

All the points about transparency, monopolies, and privacy concerns and implicit trust in general level are true, of course. They should be addressed. If you want to resist attacks and deliver content efficiently you need CDN and bigger the network is more efficient it is (Network effect is strongest in networks, no surprise there).

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#7

Post by rektide »

alokjnv10 wrote: post #5

definetly cloudflare is very harmful for the internet. It blocks crawlers. and impose captchas on every website.

The concerns listed in the article all seem repevant to companies hosting things. Im so so on cloudflare decrypting traffic for example, which they easily can do.

Your arguments are somewhat crudely stated, but the impacts on users are what concern me. The Internet Is For Users. And this policy of blocking & obstructing users along the way is 100% my worst concern about CloudFlare. It's gross to the max.

I really like their serverless workers & storage offerings, a lot. They do so much right & have great easy use tech at many levels. But the catchpas also sometimes feel like a spreading dark spot on the internet, where society goes dark. It's the worst.

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#8

Post by ilyt »

rektide wrote: post #7
alokjnv10 wrote: post #5

definetly cloudflare is very harmful for the internet. It blocks crawlers. and impose captchas on every website.

The concerns listed in the article all seem repevant to companies hosting things. Im so so on cloudflare decrypting traffic for example, which they easily can do. Your arguments are somewhat crudely stated, but the impacts on users are what concern me. The Internet Is For Users. And this policy of blocking & obstructing users along the way is 100% my worst concern about CloudFlare. It's gross to the max. I really lik…

It's hilarious as some time ago they vomited this blogpost

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-cryptographic-attest...

> "Humanity wastes about 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs. It’s time to end this madness"

Yeah no shit Cloudflare, YOU'RE THE REASON FOR IT.

And the solution is "use hardware keys and track everyone"

Re: Cloudflare is destroying the open internet

#9

Post by gjsman-1000 »

To me, this reeks just a little bit about a symptom, rather than the cause. Which is, why do people use CloudFlare?

People don't pay for things with no benefit. The internet doesn't have a built-in CDN system. The internet's not very good at blocking bot traffic or DDoS attacks. The internet's not very good at remembering things when servers go down. And so on. There are, of course, many attempts to fix these shortcomings (IPFS?), but if it wasn't Cloudflare, it would be Akamai. If it wasn't Akamai, it'd be some other company, because you can't convince people anymore to just forgo Cloudflare's benefits for ideological purity.

Instead of ranting at Cloudflare, we should be looking into how to replace Cloudflare with open standards and systems. Which is much harder than just ranting in a blog post against the symptoms of a damaged internet.

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