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...and yet they still push so hard for recentralization of the web...

samwillis 4y ago
CloudFlare are a hosting provider and CDN, they aren't "push[ing] ... hard for recentralization of the web". If it was AWS, Akamai, Google Cloud, or any of the other massive providers this comment wouldn't be made. I don't really understand the association between centralisation and CloudFlare, other than it being a Meme.
- viraptor 4y ago
  It's often mentioned about AWS, especially when us-east-1 fails. The others are not big enough to affect basically "the internet" when they go down, so don't get pointed out as centralisation issues as much. And yeah, cf is trying to get as much traffic to go through them as possible and add edge services for more opportunities - that's literally their business. Also now r2 with object storage. They're already too big, harmful (as in actually putting people in danger) and untouchable in some ways.
- johnklos 4y ago
  I think you've already drunk the Flavor Aid. What do you have when you have all DNS going through them, via DoH, and all web requests going through them, if not recentralization? Sure, they want us to think they give us the freedom to host our web sites anywhere because they're "protected" by them, but that "protection" means we've agreed to recentralize. It's pretty dismissive to describe something as a meme just because you don't understand it, and either you're pretending to not understand it, or you truly don't. Look at it this way: If a single company goes down for an hour, and that company going down for an hour causes half the web traffic on the Internet to fail for that hour, what is that if not recentralization?
  - samwillis 4y ago
    I understand that for their WAF, DDOS and threat detection products they need to have a very large amount of traffic going through them. They have been very aggressive with their free service to achieve that, to the benefit of all their customers (including the free ones). Some could see that as a push to at centralisation, I don't. What I don't understand, or believe, is that they want to be the sole (as in centralised) network for the internet. I don't believe they as a company, or the people running it, want that. They obviously have ambition to be one of the largest networking/cloud providers, and are achieving that. I don't intend either to dismiss your concerns (which are a legitimate thing to have, centralisation would be very bad), my suggestion with the meme comment is that there is at times a trend to "brigade" on large successful companies in a meme-like way. That isn't to suggest you were.
    - johnklos 4y ago
      They want to be a monopoly. They want everyone to depend on them. They may not want recentralization in general, but they definitely want as much of the Internet to depend on them as possible.
goodpoint 4y ago
If the centralization of email, social network, VPS, SaaS was not bad enough. It's pretty appalling that you are even being downvoted.

CloudFlare are a hosting provider and CDN, they aren't "push[ing] ... hard for recentralization of the web". If it was AWS, Akamai, Google Cloud, or any of the other massive providers this comment wouldn't be made. I don't really understand the association between centralisation and CloudFlare, other than it being a Meme.

viraptor 4y ago
It's often mentioned about AWS, especially when us-east-1 fails. The others are not big enough to affect basically "the internet" when they go down, so don't get pointed out as centralisation issues as much. And yeah, cf is trying to get as much traffic to go through them as possible and add edge services for more opportunities - that's literally their business. Also now r2 with object storage. They're already too big, harmful (as in actually putting people in danger) and untouchable in some ways.
johnklos 4y ago
I think you've already drunk the Flavor Aid. What do you have when you have all DNS going through them, via DoH, and all web requests going through them, if not recentralization? Sure, they want us to think they give us the freedom to host our web sites anywhere because they're "protected" by them, but that "protection" means we've agreed to recentralize. It's pretty dismissive to describe something as a meme just because you don't understand it, and either you're pretending to not understand it, or you truly don't. Look at it this way: If a single company goes down for an hour, and that company going down for an hour causes half the web traffic on the Internet to fail for that hour, what is that if not recentralization?
- samwillis 4y ago
  I understand that for their WAF, DDOS and threat detection products they need to have a very large amount of traffic going through them. They have been very aggressive with their free service to achieve that, to the benefit of all their customers (including the free ones). Some could see that as a push to at centralisation, I don't. What I don't understand, or believe, is that they want to be the sole (as in centralised) network for the internet. I don't believe they as a company, or the people running it, want that. They obviously have ambition to be one of the largest networking/cloud providers, and are achieving that. I don't intend either to dismiss your concerns (which are a legitimate thing to have, centralisation would be very bad), my suggestion with the meme comment is that there is at times a trend to "brigade" on large successful companies in a meme-like way. That isn't to suggest you were.
  - johnklos 4y ago
    They want to be a monopoly. They want everyone to depend on them. They may not want recentralization in general, but they definitely want as much of the Internet to depend on them as possible.

goodpoint 4y ago

If the centralization of email, social network, VPS, SaaS was not bad enough. It's pretty appalling that you are even being downvoted.