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I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to

I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole. As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.

xandrius 1y ago
There is no way you didn't write this comment while laughing out loud. For-profit companies care about profits for their shareholders, that's it. Heck, even non-profit often tend to value more profit than their integrity or cause but that's a topic for another day. I wish this wasn't the case but even good-willed individuals at the helm of for-profits are forced to pursue profit and avoid anything clearly leading to losses, else they are sacked.
- robinhood 1y ago
  I'm sorry you see the world that way.
  - superkuh 1y ago
    Those of us who get blocked from access services (government, commercial, personal) by cloudflare nearly every day have the lived experience to really understand the issue and the company. Most are blissfully unaware of their lack of experience. If you stick to corporate browsers you'd never know. It's not your fault, but maybe reflect on this lack of experience before commenting with so much confidence.
  - dpflug 1y ago
    Cloudflare is domiciled in the USA, where shareholder supremacy has been part of US corporate law going all the way back to Dodge v Ford Motor Co. in 1919. Now, it's in Cali, where it's not as strong a statement as in some other states, but it's still got a lot of precedent behind it.
- parineum 1y ago
  You're severely misinformed and parotting misinformed meme interpretations of fiduciary duty. Integrity and a healthy market align with fiduciary duty as long as one can make the argument that it's in the long term interest of the company. It's really, really difficult to find examples of a person being held liable for not upholding their fiduciary duty because what can be argued as good for the long term success of the company involves a lot of prognostication. Fiduciary duty is there to prevent things like a CEO choosing to oberpay his cousin's company that has no history in the market for things they've never done before when there is an obviously better option available. Companies that act poorly, as you describe, do so out of their own desire, not because they are forced to by any sort of duty.
  - xandrius 1y ago
    Since you seem so well-informed I would love any example of good-will and strictly not-for-profit activities done directly by a large corporation with shareholders which weren't done have other reasons. Examples of things which don't count: - Supporting an open source competitor to avoid getting hammered by antitrust - Giving money to a foundation (which they may or might not own) for greenwashing - Giving money to a foundation ran by a friend/family member - Doing an activity to try to fix an evil thing they did before and backfired - Doing something good for obvious PR reason (e.g. By being heavily advertised) but then do something even worse in the same area later on I'm genuinely interested in a healthy conversation about this. But I honestly cannot think of anything which either is generally free for the company or that will help them getting (or not losing) more money. Happy to be wrong.
    - quesera 1y ago
      There is no act in the world that cannot be interpreted cynically. You are arguing from a prejudiced position.
      - xandrius 1y ago
        Bringing exactly 0 examples does not help the case though.
- scubbo 1y ago
  It is baffling and concerning that anyone disagrees with you. The blind faith of so many that companies will magically and selflessly act in the best interest of anyone but their shareholders is, perhaps, the most damaging social ill we face (exacerbated by Citizens United).
andy99 1y ago
Cloudflare business model is basically to hold the internet for ransom. Why would anyone assume good faith?
- robinhood 1y ago
  I do not understand your position at all.
  - PlotCitizen 1y ago
    [flagged]
JeremyNT 1y ago
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole. This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value. When VC money is flowing, you see things that look like (or even can be) altruism - but when the belts tighten and waste is eliminated these endeavors need to align with the company's goals. Therefore, look for what Cloudflare is "buying" in this transaction. I suggest they probably want the PR win as it distracts from their objective of locking down the web, and it's worth the expenditure to them.
- boxed 1y ago
  > This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value. You can't even do that honestly. Look at Boeing. It got taken over by know-nothing managers that followed that religion of shareholder value, and what did it do? Destroy shareholder value! I think we should instead say "we can't rely on any institution to be stable over time". That's a much more sane statement imo.
  - overfeed 1y ago
    The actual metric management maximizes management remuneration, which is dependent on short-term shareholder value. Startups nominally care more about the long view, as they need to convince investors that they high long-term value and have to act accordingly. As companies grow from VC-funded, to fast-growing public, then to well-established public company, the culture shifts to match dominant shareholder expectations.
  - nerdponx 1y ago
    They are kind of different statements. For-profit institutions will almost always act in the interest of profit for the people who have an ownership stake and a claim to the prophet stream. That's definitionally why they exist, and we have enough evidence from the history of everything ever to assume that they will for the most part act that way. You are saying something different. You are pointing out that the people making decisions aren't necessarily good at making those decisions. Or maybe the incentive structure is set up such that the people making the decisions do not share the goal of profit with the company, and so decide according to what's best for them, which might or might not be what's best for the profit objective. The instability of institutions in general is yet a third characteristic.
account42 1y ago
Hi, we assume bad faith because we have seen again and again that corporate humans can be expected in ways that would at best be described as sociopathic when referring to a real flesh and blood human.
nkotov 1y ago
Cloudflare is trying to establish itself as the toll station for AI. And anyone who doesn't play by their rules gets excommunicated.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  And what are the rules? Don’t use AI to steal training content across the internet, spread nuclear grade spam and propaganda at scale, hack servers with automated agents? Seems fine.
  - pzo 1y ago
    the end game will be ai training bots will have to be: 1) like 1 cent or fraction of cent to get access to page 2) scrawlers will just cache this data on their server or just train on it so will pay just once 3) small content creators will get just make like few dollars our of it 4) CF will get some 10-30% cut from their content semaphore. 5) in the end you small content creator trading their whole content for few dollars but because CF has mass of scale they will make multi millions or more.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      Unless you have an idea to stop scraping, the status quo is all downside. Everything gets grabbed but also crawlers overwhelm servers.
    - deadbabe 1y ago
      So… invest in Cloudflare
pmdr 1y ago
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I'm already bombarded with cloudflare captchas when using Firefox, especially on Linux. Residential IP address. I'm suspicious of everything cloudflare is doing right now.
- PenguinCoder 1y ago
  Same experience here. Debian Linux with Firefox or especially using BrowSH, is a depressing experience.
- yawaramin 1y ago
  You're bombarded with Cloudflare captchas because bots are heavily scraping the websites you're browsing and they are struggling to stay online by putting in place heavy-handed bot-fighting tactics. Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing.
  - userbinator 1y ago
    Or CF could just do better caching, which was their original reason for existence.
    - yawaramin 1y ago
      CF is not magic, they have limits too. What's the point of serving cached copies to bots while real users experience unavailability?
      - userbinator 1y ago
        Unless they're actually dropping the connections with a RST, I wonder how much bots repeatedly hammering at their CAPTCHA pages (which is actually relatively large in comparison to many static sites) costs them, vs. just serving the actual content which could actually be smaller.
        yawaramin 1y ago
superkuh 1y ago
Cloudflare is running the largest and longest denial of service attacks in the history of the internet by acting as arbitrary gatekeeper to important government sites like congress.gov. I haven't been able to load it in years.
- blahyawnblah 1y ago
  It loads fine for me. Maybe you have some other problem?
  - throwaway1777 1y ago
    [dead]
  - superkuh 1y ago
    Nope. It's because the cloudflare captchas require a bleeding edge browser. If one uses a modern commercial browser it works and you've never even presented with a captcha. But in both cases I am tunneling to a VPS to avoid Comcast/Xfinity's MITM injections of javascript into pages and that adds some oddness to my connections. Comcast has a monopoly on high speed internet in my town and I cannot even get DSL or I'd switch. Lacking lived experience re: discrimination is something that's pretty common. I hate to compare my entirely optional 'software veganism' struggles with real discrmination issues, but just because you don't experience discrimination doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I go to online stores, government services, even places of recreation and I get denied service because I have to tunnel to avoid my ISP's unethical practices and I don't use a cloudflare approved browser. It feels bad.
    - quesera 1y ago
      Tell me more? Your setup seems unique and confusing. Browsing through a proxy does not need to change your User-Agent. I do this all the time. Xfinity is not MITMing HTTPS sites! You control your trusted CA list. You don't need to allow JavaScript to run on all sites.
    - stubish 1y ago
swed420 1y ago
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. > I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole. > As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI. I think general distrust with any major company these days is warranted, especially one with so much control over the internet. But I agree with your points, too. This should be relevant to the Cloudflare discussion, posted today: A New Internet Business Model? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45334599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45334599
McGlockenshire 1y ago
Well, you see, once a Cloudflare site violated the TOS so badly that they had to get their C-levels involved to decide if the TOS violation was bad enough to not want them on their platform. That one site was kicked off and this site *HOWLED* at the terrible giant internet company doing a censorship and they have never been forgiven. (The site that was "deplatformed" was fine and still exists, much to the chagrin of the minorities it directs hate towards and the people literally stalked there.)
hylaride 1y ago
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith Because they all seem to eventually "screw" us. Google seemed (and maybe actually was) altruistic at some point, and even Apple seemed to be (when the only way they could make money was to do right by the users).
lupusreal 1y ago
Assuming bad faith in the case of Cloudflare specifically? Know first that the CIA once ran a front company for decades that was meant to be a trusted source for cryptographic hardware for use by embassies and the like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG If the CIA wanted to MITM all web traffic, and why wouldn't they, a company like Cloudflare is probably exactly how they'd do it.
azemetre 1y ago
It's pretty easy, these are private companies and not democratic institutions that build consensus within their communities. It is better to assume bad faith upon corporate actors because they don't typically advocate for things that help humanity, mostly only themselves.
ACCount37 1y ago
Cloudflare is 100% acting in bad faith. They're a gatekeeper to a large chunk of Internet already. If they decide that your IP range stinks? Hope you enjoy your ration of 22 captcha pages a day! Now, they're making some very transparent moves to leverage what they have to get even more control. And once they get even more control? It's not an "if" they start choking you with it to get more revenue. It's a "when". People used to say "I wish more companies were like Google". They don't say that anymore.

xandrius 1y ago

There is no way you didn't write this comment while laughing out loud. For-profit companies care about profits for their shareholders, that's it. Heck, even non-profit often tend to value more profit than their integrity or cause but that's a topic for another day. I wish this wasn't the case but even good-willed individuals at the helm of for-profits are forced to pursue profit and avoid anything clearly leading to losses, else they are sacked.

robinhood 1y ago
I'm sorry you see the world that way.
- superkuh 1y ago
  Those of us who get blocked from access services (government, commercial, personal) by cloudflare nearly every day have the lived experience to really understand the issue and the company. Most are blissfully unaware of their lack of experience. If you stick to corporate browsers you'd never know. It's not your fault, but maybe reflect on this lack of experience before commenting with so much confidence.
- dpflug 1y ago
  Cloudflare is domiciled in the USA, where shareholder supremacy has been part of US corporate law going all the way back to Dodge v Ford Motor Co. in 1919. Now, it's in Cali, where it's not as strong a statement as in some other states, but it's still got a lot of precedent behind it.
parineum 1y ago
You're severely misinformed and parotting misinformed meme interpretations of fiduciary duty. Integrity and a healthy market align with fiduciary duty as long as one can make the argument that it's in the long term interest of the company. It's really, really difficult to find examples of a person being held liable for not upholding their fiduciary duty because what can be argued as good for the long term success of the company involves a lot of prognostication. Fiduciary duty is there to prevent things like a CEO choosing to oberpay his cousin's company that has no history in the market for things they've never done before when there is an obviously better option available. Companies that act poorly, as you describe, do so out of their own desire, not because they are forced to by any sort of duty.
- xandrius 1y ago
  Since you seem so well-informed I would love any example of good-will and strictly not-for-profit activities done directly by a large corporation with shareholders which weren't done have other reasons. Examples of things which don't count: - Supporting an open source competitor to avoid getting hammered by antitrust - Giving money to a foundation (which they may or might not own) for greenwashing - Giving money to a foundation ran by a friend/family member - Doing an activity to try to fix an evil thing they did before and backfired - Doing something good for obvious PR reason (e.g. By being heavily advertised) but then do something even worse in the same area later on I'm genuinely interested in a healthy conversation about this. But I honestly cannot think of anything which either is generally free for the company or that will help them getting (or not losing) more money. Happy to be wrong.
  - quesera 1y ago
    There is no act in the world that cannot be interpreted cynically. You are arguing from a prejudiced position.
    - xandrius 1y ago
      Bringing exactly 0 examples does not help the case though.
scubbo 1y ago
It is baffling and concerning that anyone disagrees with you. The blind faith of so many that companies will magically and selflessly act in the best interest of anyone but their shareholders is, perhaps, the most damaging social ill we face (exacerbated by Citizens United).

andy99 1y ago

Cloudflare business model is basically to hold the internet for ransom. Why would anyone assume good faith?

robinhood 1y ago
I do not understand your position at all.
- PlotCitizen 1y ago
  [flagged]

JeremyNT 1y ago

> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole. This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value. When VC money is flowing, you see things that look like (or even can be) altruism - but when the belts tighten and waste is eliminated these endeavors need to align with the company's goals. Therefore, look for what Cloudflare is "buying" in this transaction. I suggest they probably want the PR win as it distracts from their objective of locking down the web, and it's worth the expenditure to them.

boxed 1y ago
> This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value. You can't even do that honestly. Look at Boeing. It got taken over by know-nothing managers that followed that religion of shareholder value, and what did it do? Destroy shareholder value! I think we should instead say "we can't rely on any institution to be stable over time". That's a much more sane statement imo.
- overfeed 1y ago
  The actual metric management maximizes management remuneration, which is dependent on short-term shareholder value. Startups nominally care more about the long view, as they need to convince investors that they high long-term value and have to act accordingly. As companies grow from VC-funded, to fast-growing public, then to well-established public company, the culture shifts to match dominant shareholder expectations.
- nerdponx 1y ago
  They are kind of different statements. For-profit institutions will almost always act in the interest of profit for the people who have an ownership stake and a claim to the prophet stream. That's definitionally why they exist, and we have enough evidence from the history of everything ever to assume that they will for the most part act that way. You are saying something different. You are pointing out that the people making decisions aren't necessarily good at making those decisions. Or maybe the incentive structure is set up such that the people making the decisions do not share the goal of profit with the company, and so decide according to what's best for them, which might or might not be what's best for the profit objective. The instability of institutions in general is yet a third characteristic.

account42 1y ago

Hi, we assume bad faith because we have seen again and again that corporate humans can be expected in ways that would at best be described as sociopathic when referring to a real flesh and blood human.

nkotov 1y ago

Cloudflare is trying to establish itself as the toll station for AI. And anyone who doesn't play by their rules gets excommunicated.

deadbabe 1y ago
And what are the rules? Don’t use AI to steal training content across the internet, spread nuclear grade spam and propaganda at scale, hack servers with automated agents? Seems fine.
- pzo 1y ago
  the end game will be ai training bots will have to be: 1) like 1 cent or fraction of cent to get access to page 2) scrawlers will just cache this data on their server or just train on it so will pay just once 3) small content creators will get just make like few dollars our of it 4) CF will get some 10-30% cut from their content semaphore. 5) in the end you small content creator trading their whole content for few dollars but because CF has mass of scale they will make multi millions or more.
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    Unless you have an idea to stop scraping, the status quo is all downside. Everything gets grabbed but also crawlers overwhelm servers.
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    So… invest in Cloudflare

pmdr 1y ago

> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I'm already bombarded with cloudflare captchas when using Firefox, especially on Linux. Residential IP address. I'm suspicious of everything cloudflare is doing right now.

PenguinCoder 1y ago
Same experience here. Debian Linux with Firefox or especially using BrowSH, is a depressing experience.
yawaramin 1y ago
You're bombarded with Cloudflare captchas because bots are heavily scraping the websites you're browsing and they are struggling to stay online by putting in place heavy-handed bot-fighting tactics. Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing.
- userbinator 1y ago
  Or CF could just do better caching, which was their original reason for existence.
  - yawaramin 1y ago
    CF is not magic, they have limits too. What's the point of serving cached copies to bots while real users experience unavailability?
    - userbinator 1y ago
      Unless they're actually dropping the connections with a RST, I wonder how much bots repeatedly hammering at their CAPTCHA pages (which is actually relatively large in comparison to many static sites) costs them, vs. just serving the actual content which could actually be smaller.
      - yawaramin 1y ago

superkuh 1y ago

Cloudflare is running the largest and longest denial of service attacks in the history of the internet by acting as arbitrary gatekeeper to important government sites like congress.gov. I haven't been able to load it in years.

blahyawnblah 1y ago
It loads fine for me. Maybe you have some other problem?
- throwaway1777 1y ago
  [dead]
- superkuh 1y ago
  Nope. It's because the cloudflare captchas require a bleeding edge browser. If one uses a modern commercial browser it works and you've never even presented with a captcha. But in both cases I am tunneling to a VPS to avoid Comcast/Xfinity's MITM injections of javascript into pages and that adds some oddness to my connections. Comcast has a monopoly on high speed internet in my town and I cannot even get DSL or I'd switch. Lacking lived experience re: discrimination is something that's pretty common. I hate to compare my entirely optional 'software veganism' struggles with real discrmination issues, but just because you don't experience discrimination doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I go to online stores, government services, even places of recreation and I get denied service because I have to tunnel to avoid my ISP's unethical practices and I don't use a cloudflare approved browser. It feels bad.
  - quesera 1y ago
    Tell me more? Your setup seems unique and confusing. Browsing through a proxy does not need to change your User-Agent. I do this all the time. Xfinity is not MITMing HTTPS sites! You control your trusted CA list. You don't need to allow JavaScript to run on all sites.
  - stubish 1y ago

swed420 1y ago

> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. > I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole. > As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI. I think general distrust with any major company these days is warranted, especially one with so much control over the internet. But I agree with your points, too. This should be relevant to the Cloudflare discussion, posted today: A New Internet Business Model? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45334599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45334599

McGlockenshire 1y ago

Well, you see, once a Cloudflare site violated the TOS so badly that they had to get their C-levels involved to decide if the TOS violation was bad enough to not want them on their platform. That one site was kicked off and this site *HOWLED* at the terrible giant internet company doing a censorship and they have never been forgiven. (The site that was "deplatformed" was fine and still exists, much to the chagrin of the minorities it directs hate towards and the people literally stalked there.)

hylaride 1y ago

> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith Because they all seem to eventually "screw" us. Google seemed (and maybe actually was) altruistic at some point, and even Apple seemed to be (when the only way they could make money was to do right by the users).

lupusreal 1y ago

Assuming bad faith in the case of Cloudflare specifically? Know first that the CIA once ran a front company for decades that was meant to be a trusted source for cryptographic hardware for use by embassies and the like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG If the CIA wanted to MITM all web traffic, and why wouldn't they, a company like Cloudflare is probably exactly how they'd do it.

azemetre 1y ago

It's pretty easy, these are private companies and not democratic institutions that build consensus within their communities. It is better to assume bad faith upon corporate actors because they don't typically advocate for things that help humanity, mostly only themselves.

ACCount37 1y ago

Cloudflare is 100% acting in bad faith. They're a gatekeeper to a large chunk of Internet already. If they decide that your IP range stinks? Hope you enjoy your ration of 22 captcha pages a day! Now, they're making some very transparent moves to leverage what they have to get even more control. And once they get even more control? It's not an "if" they start choking you with it to get more revenue. It's a "when". People used to say "I wish more companies were like Google". They don't say that anymore.