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> Technical fundamentals matter. Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing for people who care about technical fundamental

by dsl 7y ago

> Technical fundamentals matter. Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing for people who care about technical fundamentals.

groundlogic 7y ago
Yeah, from a citizen perspective I agree. C'est la vie. Our governments need to work against this via legislation. It should not be up to Matthew Prince to decide who to block. He has demonstrated his inability to function as censor in a very visible (and frankly embarassing) way.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  > He has demonstrated his inability to function as censor in a very visible (and frankly embarassing) way. How? There have been exactly two cases of "censorship", and that is the Daily Stormer and 8chan. One is an utterly vile peddler of antisemitism (literally named after a Nazi paper) and conspiracy theory, and one was linked to at least three terroristic attacks. If it were not white supremacists but Islamists, it would be closed down in an instant and no one would bat an eye. If anything, Cloudflare seriously lacks (like Facebook and Twitter) policing their customer base.
  - tidepod12 7y ago
    >If it were not white supremacists but Islamists, it would be closed down in an instant and no one would bat an eye. This is ironic since Cloudflare has famously been under fire because Prince specifically decided against removing ISIS websites from Cloudflare and vehemently defended his decision that Cloudflare should not be censoring anyone. Prince himself even agrees with the parent comment, and he goes into pretty good detail in his blog post here [1] about why companies like Cloudflare should not be able to make the decision to remove websites, and that it should be left up to governments. I guess he got overruled on that stance when it came to 8chan, though. 1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
gmanley 7y ago
If you are just using the basic service for a firewall/DDOS protection and CDN there doesn't seem to be much lock in. If other competitors come along, and they undoubtedly will if Cloudflare proves the value of the market, it should just be a matter of switching your DNS records to said competitor. Maybe I'm not imaginative enough, so please share if I'm not thinking of something, but it doesn't seem like their market share makes it harder for other competitors, they aren't monopolistic.
macinjosh 7y ago
Exactly! I don't why Internet folks fall into this trap time and time again! It's probably simply because it is an easy and quick way to tell your boss your website is protected consequences be damned. I can imagine the next Edward Snowden will reveal the intelligence community's direct line into the traffic running over Cloudflare's infrastructure. Cloudflare is providing DNS and HTTPS services on a massive scale which means they can essentially MiTM any of their customers on behalf of the government.
- JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
  It depends on the topic of discussion. If we are discussing the viability of a company, and trying to project long term success, then this is all good news. If you are discussing whats best for society and how these businesses impact those things, then this could be alarming news.
  - dmix 7y ago
    There's a big shift towards privacy happening now. If Cloudflare came out a decade ago I'd also be in their camp. But the risks are too high and developers are starting to recognize that Cloudflare is far from free and comes with long terms consequences for the health and resiliency of the internet. I appreciate how they pushed HTTPs widely. But now that's Let's encrypt exists there's no excuse. Ill also never forgive them for making Tor completely unusable for accessing any normal website. It's almost impossible to pass the security checks and if you do another one is coming once you switch IP. I understand Tor is a niche product but it's an important one for activists and other persecuted people. And it will only continue to grow in importance as the dictators all learn how to do NSA style mass surveillance. The DDOS stuff if the harder problem to solve and I don't know enough about it to judge the competition's ability to offer it safely and privacy friendly way.
    - JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
      I mean, that's like your opinion or whatever, sure. But this S-1 filing is about if they are a sustainable business. And none of what you touched on would seem to have any serious impact on their business model. The Tor stuff feels way over blown to me. I worked at CF while it was a problem, and was an avid Tor user at the time. It was a terrible user experience, but it wasn't completely Cloudflare's fault. They didn't target Tor users, Tor exit nodes have terrible IP rep which is an industry standard for risk rating IPs. ReCaptcha had some functional issues that could not be solved by Cloudflare. And lastly, site owners did next to nothing to support their Tor visitors even once dedicated options were available via the IP Firewall. This seems like hyperbole, especially as JGC was avid about getting this resolved, and was very public with the discourse. Companies don't do things perfect all the time, and it seems extreme to hold CF purely responsible and hold onto that anger for something that's long been resolved. In the end, everything in this S-1 is promising for people interested in tech businesses, which is what many people are praising. They already generate a profit, their operation costs are reasonable, etc.
est31 7y ago
> Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing They do the opposite. They enable small website owners to survive on the internet without having to use vertically integrated services like cloud offerings.
- dsl 7y ago
  I'm not sure you fully understand the problem. If I hit the big red button and just shut Cloudflare off, millions of websites drop off the Internet. It is a massive single point of failure, and as you point out, a vertically integrated service (DNS, DDoS protection, WAF, proxying, etc).
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    DNS is far from centralized and DDoS protection is something that small websites would have no ability to do on their own. It isn't just a convenience thing, it's a literally-impossible-without-scale thing.
    - ggg3 7y ago
      but you are missing the forest for the trees. small websites are not hosted by small websites, they are hosted by ISP and small CDNs. who have/contract their own dos mitigation services, which are now all dead because everyone settled for the one big cdn to cdn them all.
    - labawi 7y ago
      DDoS protection is something that small websites should not need. Current circumstances are a sad and unfortunate state of the internet.
      - makomk 7y ago
        Not only that, Cloudflare has helped to ensure that DDoS protection is something that every website needs. Under normal circumstances, all the shady DDoS-as-a-service providers would DDoS each other off the internet and leave everyone else in relative peace. However, Cloudflare kindly provided them all with free, world-class, no-questions-asked DDoS protection to ensure that they could continue operating their business of destroying sites that didn't use Cloudflare.
auslander 7y ago
> the entire internet behind a single entity You're giving CF too much credit. They are very small fish, as it seems from the S-1. But still dangerous because they MITM while operating for free at loss, so don't reuse passwords and logins between sites.
- gmanley 7y ago
  They handle about 10% of web requests according to this blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer If we trust that metric, it seems significant to me. Not what I would call small fish.
  - auslander 7y ago
    Small animals tend to puff to look bigger :) 10% of whole internet on a budget of 50-80M / year is hard to believe.
    - smallbigfish 7y ago
      US ISPs make you think that internet traffic is like gold ;). I get tens of terabytes here in Europe for 10€.
madeofpalk 7y ago
You realise that Cloudflare is nowhere near a monopoly, right? They might be the most 'household' CDN, but they're far from the first or biggest

by dsl 7y ago

> Technical fundamentals matter. Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing for people who care about technical fundamentals.

groundlogic 7y ago

Yeah, from a citizen perspective I agree. C'est la vie. Our governments need to work against this via legislation. It should not be up to Matthew Prince to decide who to block. He has demonstrated his inability to function as censor in a very visible (and frankly embarassing) way.

mschuster91 7y ago
> He has demonstrated his inability to function as censor in a very visible (and frankly embarassing) way. How? There have been exactly two cases of "censorship", and that is the Daily Stormer and 8chan. One is an utterly vile peddler of antisemitism (literally named after a Nazi paper) and conspiracy theory, and one was linked to at least three terroristic attacks. If it were not white supremacists but Islamists, it would be closed down in an instant and no one would bat an eye. If anything, Cloudflare seriously lacks (like Facebook and Twitter) policing their customer base.
- tidepod12 7y ago
  >If it were not white supremacists but Islamists, it would be closed down in an instant and no one would bat an eye. This is ironic since Cloudflare has famously been under fire because Prince specifically decided against removing ISIS websites from Cloudflare and vehemently defended his decision that Cloudflare should not be censoring anyone. Prince himself even agrees with the parent comment, and he goes into pretty good detail in his blog post here [1] about why companies like Cloudflare should not be able to make the decision to remove websites, and that it should be left up to governments. I guess he got overruled on that stance when it came to 8chan, though. 1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

gmanley 7y ago

If you are just using the basic service for a firewall/DDOS protection and CDN there doesn't seem to be much lock in. If other competitors come along, and they undoubtedly will if Cloudflare proves the value of the market, it should just be a matter of switching your DNS records to said competitor. Maybe I'm not imaginative enough, so please share if I'm not thinking of something, but it doesn't seem like their market share makes it harder for other competitors, they aren't monopolistic.

macinjosh 7y ago

Exactly! I don't why Internet folks fall into this trap time and time again! It's probably simply because it is an easy and quick way to tell your boss your website is protected consequences be damned. I can imagine the next Edward Snowden will reveal the intelligence community's direct line into the traffic running over Cloudflare's infrastructure. Cloudflare is providing DNS and HTTPS services on a massive scale which means they can essentially MiTM any of their customers on behalf of the government.

JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
It depends on the topic of discussion. If we are discussing the viability of a company, and trying to project long term success, then this is all good news. If you are discussing whats best for society and how these businesses impact those things, then this could be alarming news.
- dmix 7y ago
  There's a big shift towards privacy happening now. If Cloudflare came out a decade ago I'd also be in their camp. But the risks are too high and developers are starting to recognize that Cloudflare is far from free and comes with long terms consequences for the health and resiliency of the internet. I appreciate how they pushed HTTPs widely. But now that's Let's encrypt exists there's no excuse. Ill also never forgive them for making Tor completely unusable for accessing any normal website. It's almost impossible to pass the security checks and if you do another one is coming once you switch IP. I understand Tor is a niche product but it's an important one for activists and other persecuted people. And it will only continue to grow in importance as the dictators all learn how to do NSA style mass surveillance. The DDOS stuff if the harder problem to solve and I don't know enough about it to judge the competition's ability to offer it safely and privacy friendly way.
  - JakeTheAndroid 7y ago
    I mean, that's like your opinion or whatever, sure. But this S-1 filing is about if they are a sustainable business. And none of what you touched on would seem to have any serious impact on their business model. The Tor stuff feels way over blown to me. I worked at CF while it was a problem, and was an avid Tor user at the time. It was a terrible user experience, but it wasn't completely Cloudflare's fault. They didn't target Tor users, Tor exit nodes have terrible IP rep which is an industry standard for risk rating IPs. ReCaptcha had some functional issues that could not be solved by Cloudflare. And lastly, site owners did next to nothing to support their Tor visitors even once dedicated options were available via the IP Firewall. This seems like hyperbole, especially as JGC was avid about getting this resolved, and was very public with the discourse. Companies don't do things perfect all the time, and it seems extreme to hold CF purely responsible and hold onto that anger for something that's long been resolved. In the end, everything in this S-1 is promising for people interested in tech businesses, which is what many people are praising. They already generate a profit, their operation costs are reasonable, etc.

est31 7y ago

> Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing They do the opposite. They enable small website owners to survive on the internet without having to use vertically integrated services like cloud offerings.

dsl 7y ago
I'm not sure you fully understand the problem. If I hit the big red button and just shut Cloudflare off, millions of websites drop off the Internet. It is a massive single point of failure, and as you point out, a vertically integrated service (DNS, DDoS protection, WAF, proxying, etc).
- _bxg1 7y ago
  DNS is far from centralized and DDoS protection is something that small websites would have no ability to do on their own. It isn't just a convenience thing, it's a literally-impossible-without-scale thing.
  - ggg3 7y ago
    but you are missing the forest for the trees. small websites are not hosted by small websites, they are hosted by ISP and small CDNs. who have/contract their own dos mitigation services, which are now all dead because everyone settled for the one big cdn to cdn them all.
  - labawi 7y ago
    DDoS protection is something that small websites should not need. Current circumstances are a sad and unfortunate state of the internet.
    - makomk 7y ago
      Not only that, Cloudflare has helped to ensure that DDoS protection is something that every website needs. Under normal circumstances, all the shady DDoS-as-a-service providers would DDoS each other off the internet and leave everyone else in relative peace. However, Cloudflare kindly provided them all with free, world-class, no-questions-asked DDoS protection to ensure that they could continue operating their business of destroying sites that didn't use Cloudflare.

auslander 7y ago

> the entire internet behind a single entity You're giving CF too much credit. They are very small fish, as it seems from the S-1. But still dangerous because they MITM while operating for free at loss, so don't reuse passwords and logins between sites.

gmanley 7y ago
They handle about 10% of web requests according to this blog post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer If we trust that metric, it seems significant to me. Not what I would call small fish.
- auslander 7y ago
  Small animals tend to puff to look bigger :) 10% of whole internet on a budget of 50-80M / year is hard to believe.
  - smallbigfish 7y ago
    US ISPs make you think that internet traffic is like gold ;). I get tens of terabytes here in Europe for 10€.

madeofpalk 7y ago

You realise that Cloudflare is nowhere near a monopoly, right? They might be the most 'household' CDN, but they're far from the first or biggest