Cloudflare CEO is lying to you about the bot traffic jump

The fact is, Cloudflare is a man-in-the-middle. That's their focus, that's their purpose.

They will limit your local crawler from accessing pages. They will demand you use their crawler.

They will decrypt your traffic if they get a warrant. They always decrypt your traffic anyway, but they will give it to state actors if they demand it.

That's not to say anyone should break the laws, but the issue right now is that intellectual property is incompatible with what is coming with AI.

I don't hate on Cloudflare because it's a bad service. It's actually pretty good, but the fundamental problem is they make their purpose to be a single choke point of all data on the Web.

That's not right. It never was.

If the "bot traffic" declines, then the "bot protection business" goes down with it

Cloudflare communication are sometimes careful to refer to traffic _labeled as_ bot traffic versus actual bot traffic

Because the "business" relies on the existance of "bot traffic", theres an incentive to broaden the scope of what is labeled as "bot traffic"

The false positive rate can be high. The public should see those statistics, and in truth it may be infeasible to compile them when theres no verification and the entire system relies on heuristics

"Bot protection" can be used to gather fingerprints for marketing

It can be used to force users to use certain software, e.g., certain browsers, and to enable Javascript subjecting users to data collection, surveillance and ads

Originally the motivation for avoiding "bot traffic" was based on behaviour, e.g., exceeding acceptable rates of usage, making too many requests in a given time period, exceeding rate limits

Now it's available to exclude traffic based on criteria such as what browser someone is using. NB. This is more than "user-agent string". The company forces people to sign NDAs before telling them what it is doing to fingerprint www users

If residential proxies are the problem then why not go after the companies that provide them

The truth is that those companies are not the problem. Their customers are so-called "tech" companies

Perhaps it's these so-called "tech" companies that are the problem

Certainly the problem is not the individual www user who doesnt use an "approved" graphical, Javascript-enabled browser who gets blocked or fingerprinted trying to make a single request

But thats who suffers from "bot protection" so that so-called "tech" companies can profit from data collection, surveillance and ads

You get the numbers that Cloudflare tells you, but who knows if you can trust their stats after their CEO is apparently cherry-picking data to shape their product narrative?