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To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those.

To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. At least they’re not selling ads using your data.

surfingdino 1y ago
I started building on Cloudflare, but after their "pay us 120k or else" tactics they got famous for I decided to move code elsewhere.
NooneAtAll3 1y ago
you're right internet is made sooo much better by negating all encryption effort of the last 20 years
azemetre 1y ago
If Cloudflare is so vital to the internet, it should be nationalized for the public benefit as having a private entity with so much control over the internet is not a good thing. Corporatized control of the internet should not be encouraged.
- citizenpaul 1y ago
  I would say if the political environment pre 1980s was still in existence that might be true. Today that would just mean the entire thing would unravel as it ate its own tail in the race to the bottom environment we are currently in.
  - azemetre 1y ago
    You can create democratic policies to thwart this. Even something as basic as nationalizing Cloudflare then forcing workplace democracy provisions on it would probably do more good for, not just the Cloudflare workers, but society writ large.
  - Gormo 1y ago
    Which political environment pre-1980s do you want to go back to? 1930s? 1850s? 1760s?
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > Which political environment pre-1980s do you want to go back to? 1934 [1]. [1] https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep295/usrep295602/usrep295602.pdf https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep... Humphrey's Executor vs. United States
      - Gormo 1y ago
        I can't imagine what a court case about whether the US president has the power to unilaterally dismiss officials in executive-branch agencies could possibly have to do with this. At least you're referencing the United States in 1934, though. Things were very dysfunctional politically in the US at that time, but not nearly as bad as what was going on in some other parts of the world.
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > can't imagine what a court case about whether the US president has the power to unilaterally dismiss officials in executive-branch agencies could possibly have to do with this Seriously? You don't see the relevance of independent agencies to this discussion?
        Gormo 1y ago
        No. And the dynamics of inter-branch checks and balances within the US federal government aren't directly relevant to the question of whether the federal government as a whole is a reliable institution in the first place (nb: it isn't).
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > the dynamics of inter-branch checks and balances within the US federal government aren't directly relevant to the question of whether the federal government as a whole is a reliable institution in the first place You don’t see a reliability difference between a self-moderating and unmoderated system? Do you see any value in QC?
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Can't believe if you are joking or not. I trust a corporation more than I trust the nation you want it nationalized in (America?) EU maybe. But yes I don't want cloudflare to be part of america after patriotic acts and all the dystopia. Honestly, cloudflare is not so vital to the internet. Like, The only thing its gonna be a problem if they stop working without giving any way to migrate. Then yes, its gonna be a bit of problem to the internet.
  - encom 1y ago
    >cloudflare is not so vital to the internet Really? Try distrusting CF certs, and see how much of your internet activity breaks. CF certs should be distrusted, because it's MITM by definition. At the very least, I'd like an addon that makes the URL bar bright red, so I know my connection isn't secure.
    - swiftcoder 1y ago
      It's not more vital, than, say, AWS. Blocking AWS certs/endpoints will break your internet too. Though arguably neither should be in a position to do so without being regulate as a public utility
      - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
        Yup, I also meant the same when I was writing my comment and although I agree about regulation, the thing is, that I don't even trust that aspect... Also, I know that there are sometimes where cloudflare sits in the middle between your servers and your users for DDOS protection, and so yes theoretically its a point of interception but given how their whole thing is security, I doubt that they would exploit it but yes its a point of concern. On the other hand, if something like this does happen, migrating can be easier or on the same level if something like this happened on like AWS. But cloudflare still feels safer than AWS y'know? That being said, I am all in for some regulations as a public utility but not nationalizing it as the GP comment suggested. Just some regulations would be nice but honestly we are in a bit of tough spot and maybe it was the necessity of the internet to have something like cloudflare to prevent DDOS's.
- Gormo 1y ago
  To make sure I understand, your position is that anything vitally important to the internet should not be under the control of a plurality of institutions subject to heterogenous incentive structures, but instead should be under the centralized, monopolistic control of a single institution that is perpetually compromised by perverse incentives and ulterior motives, whose mechanisms of accountability are mostly performative and demonstrably broken? I'm not sure that sounds like a good idea, if that's what you're saying.
  - azemetre 1y ago
    My position is that if something becomes critical it should be under democratic constraints in a democratic society and not private enterprises that have no forms of control by the populace. Maybe if Cloudflare had workplace democracy my concerns would be different, but they don't and wield too much power. If it also helps I also think 99.99% of big tech should be broken up into separate, probably a few 100, different companies. So yes, anything vital for the internet should be controlled by the people through democratic norms, institutions, and values rather than dictatorships by those with money over those with none.
    - Gormo 1y ago
      No such thing as "democratic constraints" or "democratic society" at the level you're discussing. Democracy is an imperfect safeguard against certain types of extreme dysfunction of the political system -- a necessary one for sure, but not nearly sufficient to make the institutions it applies to trustworthy with monopolistic control over other aspects of society. Everything reduces to specific people acting on their a priori motivations in bounded contexts, and any system of centralized control is guaranteed to enable expressions of the worst motivations of the people involved. The distinctions you're making -- "private" vs. "public", "corporations" vs. "governments", etc. -- are fundamentally meaningless. There are no "democratic norms", just norms adhered to by specific people and the factions they form, contesting against each other for power over others. Performative "democracy" is often just cover to allow the currently dominant factions to function as "dictatorships". Decentralization and individual autonomy are the only solution to the problems you rightly care about, but what you're proposing is literally the opposite of that.
mrbluecoat 1y ago
Arguably, ecommerce was worse without Amazon but are we really better off?
- busymom0 1y ago
  Shipping times are definitely better off industry wide because of Amazon.
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    Same day shipping was always the norm here. Order something before 14:00 - 16:00, depending on where the company was on the route for package pickups, and you'd have your package the next day. Amazon has normalized multi-day / weeks shipping, so they've made it worse.
    - gruez 1y ago
      Where is this?
      - mrweasel 1y ago
        Denmark, there is no close Amazon warehouse, so shipping always suck. Not only is shipping times frequently a week or more, it's also overpriced and items are frequently less expensive from local online stores. Amazons only advantage is it's massive selection, if you can find what you're looking for.
        0x457 1y ago
        In the US, it's the opposite. If you order directly from the brand, you get multi-day or more often multi-week delivery times. Unless they are using amazon logistic and which case it's the same as buying off amazon - 0/1/2-day delivery times.
        nulbyte 1y ago
kalaksi 1y ago
> At least they’re not selling ads using your data. Yet. Since it's an american company with an ever-growing influence, I dread and expect that to change, among other things, down the road. I assume the three-letter agencies also already MITM the traffic.
- nenenejej 1y ago
  Assume your beloved tech company can be bought by Oracle and proceed on that basis.
  - galphanet 1y ago
    You forgot about Broadcom !
riedel 1y ago
CDNs always existed IMHO. The world before cloudflare was just much more hidden. In general I find their take at the typical cloud business from a network perspective mostly refreshing. However, I guess they have become the major player now and certainly try to optimize the world towards their business model. IMHO it needs other enterprises entering the competition. Maybe it could be new more software defined mobile network providers offering edge compute. Maybe data from IoT could never enter the Internet and we could have some confidential computing power when we need it for our IoT stuff. Maybe we could get a more decentralized Internet again...
- motorest 1y ago
  > However, I guess they have become the major player now and certainly try to optimize the world towards their business model. I don't think that's it, and I think the explanation is much more simple and straight-forward. Cloudflare established a very successful business model around a straight-forward, very transparent, no-bullshit CDN. Now, they started offering other cloud services build around their CDN. Cloudflare Workers kind of extend their CDN pipeline to allow clients to run arbitrary code to customize caching logic, but it turns out their function-as-a-service model is exceptionally good, and higher-level services like email are a low-effort way to meet existing needs.
  - gpi 1y ago
    Cloudflare is far from a no bullshit CDN. The vendor lock in is real with an aggressive unethcial sales model.
    - vel0city 1y ago
      I'm not entirely aware of all their products, but just thinking about a CDN, isn't that in many ways kind of fungible? Is it really that hard to migrate to your big cloud co's CDN (CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN) or the several other large competitors without an immense amount of work? Please, educate me and tell me what's up.
      - 1y ago
makeitdouble 1y ago
I think the point is to keep them in that mindset, and that requires competition and some counterbalance that won't be there is everyone just moves to Cloudflare.
immibis 1y ago
If CF limited their clients to big businesses (just like Akamai and who else?) it might be less bad, but as it is, they're trying to get the whole internet including small sites on board.
mrweasel 1y ago
I still believe that CloudFlare means well, but that doesn't mean that I agree with the increased centralization. This isn't the fault of CloudFlare, they are just exploiting a business opportunity and as you say: At least they're not selling ads. It is a legitimate business, from my perspective. I'd just wish we weren't in a situation where CloudFlare isn't exactly struggling to sell their services.
- motorest 1y ago
  > I still believe that CloudFlare means well, but that doesn't mean that I agree with the increased centralization. I'm perplexed by this sort of comment. Cloudflare doesn't even feature in the top 10 of cloud provider market share, and the number 8 spot already reports 2%. And here you are, complaining about Cloudflare and centralization. Furthermore, AWS is by far the biggest cloud provider, reporting around 30% market share, and I don't see AWS being referred as a concern.
  - mrweasel 1y ago
    20% of websites uses CloudFlare(1, 2), even companies that use AWS, GCP and Azure have their services behind CloudFlare. 1) https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/13/cloudflare_2024_review/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/13/cloudflare_2024_revie... 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudflare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudflare
segmondy 1y ago
The internet is worse for me with Cloudflare. I'm using a cellphone router for my internet. My guess is I don't get a dedicated IP and probably behind a NAT with other users. 85% of my request needs me to solve a cloudflare captcha. on bad days I have to do this easily 100+ times.
- hnav 1y ago
  Have you played with IPv6 vs IPv4? Wonder what's worse there, CGNAT-ed IPv4 or an inherently low-reputation IPv6.
- gruez 1y ago
  But what's the counterfactual? People use cloudflare because they want protection from ddos attacks and bots. If cloudflare didn't exist there would probably be similar measures.
  - TeMPOraL 1y ago
    Businesses want to protect the continuity of their business operations, and to that end they buy such protection as a service, from a business that managed to MitM half the Internet in order to provide such service. Point being, it's a commercial subverting the Internet from inside, reshaping it to better serve the interests of commerce. It is indeed protection, but it's accomplished by reducing variance. 99% of legitimate commerce on the Internet follows the same patterns, use a small subset of possibilities offered by the technology - so why not just block the remaining 1% that doesn't fit and call it a day? It will stop most of the threats to running businesses on the Internet. The 1% of legitimate commerce that doesn't fit the pattern? It's not being ignored per se, just pressured to adapt and conform to the majority. What is being ignored is that the Internet is not just a place of commerce, and non-commercial use cases, ideas such as empowering people to better their lives, are gradually becoming impossible, as fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them. Some of us still remember the Internet being more than just a virtual mall, and are unhappy about it gradually becoming one. And it's not like CloudFlare, et al. are hostile to non-commercial interests as a matter of principle - it's just out of scope for them.
sssilver 1y ago
> At least they’re not selling ads using your data Sounds great, until a new CEO steps in. Any company is exactly one (or more often zero) CEO away from doing whatever they want (within legal constraints) with their business, in order to fulfill their fiduciary duty (and greed).
- eastdakota 1y ago
  I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.
  - rcakebread 1y ago
    How do you know?
    - akimbostrawman 1y ago
      Probably asked his handler
  - mike_d 1y ago
    I am genuinely curious what protections are in place to ensure that? What is the plan after you are gone? It looks like you have voting shares with 10x the power of institutional investors, but activist investors aren't dumb either. My biggest fear of Cloudflare has always been that one day you'll get hit by a bus and someone will figure out that merging Cloudflare with an ad network would create so much more shareholder value. The road to hell is paved with free DDoS mitigation, so to speak.
  - anonyfox 1y ago
    Huge fan of Cloudflare here actually. It’s always such a breath of fresh air compared to the heavyweight configuration hells like AWS. And for doing super convenient stuff like make node:http work on cloud functions recently, but guess only certain DevOps guys realize how cool that is compared to other FaaS wrapping ceremonies. Too bad you don’t hire senior folks in Germany currently, would probably join in a heartbeat for emotional reasons alone. Keep going, lightweight features on a tap and solid reliability over years is exactly what I need and want at least.
betaby 1y ago
> To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare It was better. 'Wget' and 'links' worked with most of the sites.
- ezfe 1y ago
  wget isn't supposed to work on these sites. They've chosen Cloudflare and asked them to do this.
  - stingraycharles 1y ago
    That’s exactly the part that people forget: all these policies are decided to be applied by the website owners. It started with DDoS blocking and they just extended it to more things. I feel like people here are forgetting the fact just how hostile bad actors on the internet are / can be.
    - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
      How website owners enable infinite captcha?
    - fragmede 1y ago
      That brings up opt-in vs opt-out tho, and last time I looked, Cloudflare defaulted to automatically signing website owners for it. That is to say, if you just mash next, Cloudflare blocks "AI", whatever that means.
jasonvorhe 1y ago
I don't know what kind of internet you used but mine didn't randomly decide to block my access to a website because some quasi monopolist decided I wasn't allowed to use a certain website for intransparent reasons.
- troyvit 1y ago
  Being blocked from a web site and having to hit a little box are two different things. Are you talking about the former or the latter? If it's the former ... that has literally never happened to me unless I'm on a VPN and even then it's rarely (if ever) CF that's doing the blocking. If it's the latter then it reflects the sad truth that we can't have nice things anymoret. I have lots of problems with the accessibility of that box, but either Cloudflare would be implementing it, somebody else would be implementing it, or a huge chunk of data would be unavailable to you anyway because of accidental DDoS attacks caused by irresponsibly deployed bots.
  - forgotmypw17 1y ago
    This has happened for me on regular residential Internet access. (Check the box, and get redirected to check the box again.)
    - reitanuki 1y ago
      I hit this too, maybe on the order of one day every month or two? I'm using a fairly mainstream ISP in a fairly mainstream country. I don't get why I seem to have such a hard time. I've kept the same IP for months. But the worst thing overall is that it just doesn't acknowledge it. Want to block me? OK. But tell me that! Don't just make me tick a box again and again and untick it. It's infuriating.
  - inetknght 1y ago
    > Being blocked from a web site and having to hit a little box are two different things. Maybe for you. But I don't let random unvetted websites run code on my computer. Checking that box requires it.
bogwog 1y ago
> Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. Not to comment on whether they're actually a monopoly or not (since idk much about CF's market share, except that it's big), but how does this prove they aren't a monopoly? If anything, it'd work as evidence to prove that they are.
egorfine 1y ago
> the internet was worse without Cloudflare It had much more freedom. Currently it's up to Cloudflare to decide whether you will read that article or not. Tomorrow some stupid law will mandate certain ideas to be hidden from children[1] and Cloudflare will happily comply. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children
- zenmac 1y ago
  For example, recently certain big corp ask me to verify something. I clicked on the link in the E-Mail and it was suck on Cloudflare the click button over and over again. No matter how many times I clicked. Do I need to find another internet access now?
  - paulgb 1y ago
    I would bet in the direction of this being a bug on big corp's side rather than Cloudflare's.
    - viraptor 1y ago
      No, it's a common issue. A bit of traffic is always misclassified and one day you'll be the unlucky one. And there's nothing you can do about it beyond trying different device on a different network.
  - miki123211 1y ago
    You need to become more like a "normal person." No VPN (unless your ISP is extremely shady, then do use a VPN or change ISP), no overly zealous adblock (ublock origin on default settings should be fine), no JS blocking / weird privacy extensions / whatever, nno PiHole, just what your average, relatively tech-savvy geek would use. HN readerships's problems with Cloudflare are mostly their own fault. "normal" internet users don't have these problems[1]. [1] except for people in specific countries, and I do feel sorry for those.
    - 1y ago
t_mahmood 1y ago
We said the same thing with Google, "Don't be evil", "They are better than MS", now here we are, Google, became something that doing everything to squeeze every data off us, so that they can sell them to their partners. And, anything that stops them from doing it, well, you are kind of erased from the Internet. The freedom we had, slowly becoming non-existent now. Corporates have one and only one target. It is to make money. And this mentality, enables them.
- gundmc 1y ago
  Google doesn't sell data, they sell ads
stevenfoster 1y ago
Yet…
ies7 1y ago
These sentences are what I would used to describe Google 10 years ago.
viraptor 1y ago
There are other services, but CloudFlare is too well known. They're close to monopoly in the DDoS protection business unfortunately. But we still have a choice and for long-term success we should be choosing other companies where possible.
HaZeust 1y ago
>" Google is in a perfect position to compete *but they don’t* [emphasis mine], so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something." That is how it works LOL, just because someone only has the capacity to compete with a monopoly doesn't mean that the monopoly has competition.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I'm fine with it." Cloudflare not only blocking IA but asking for money on behalf of the website operator, as a "service" https://web.archive.org/web/20250920180605if_/https://www.theverge.com/news/773928/google-open-web-rapid-decline https://web.archive.org/web/20250920180605if_/https://www.th...
- 542458 1y ago
  That's the site owner demanding payment via cloudflare, not cloudflare unilaterally deciding to charge money (as far as I can tell at least). https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/ Looks like The Verge either set up an excessively tight pay-per-crawl policy or doesn't want IA scraping their stuff.
  - incoming1211 1y ago
    Cloudflare enabled blocking by default. People were on X complaining about it.
    - thephyber 1y ago
      Blocking access to everyone or to scraping crawlers? They have detailed stats about the behavior of all visitors, including how bot-like they are and how likely they are to scrape your (their users’) content.
- stingraycharles 1y ago
  Cloudflare offers a service to website owners to do that, yes. It’s the owners’ decision if they want to monetize on the content. Is it that bad that Cloudflare offers people these choices?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
  Not restricted to CF https://web.archive.org/web/20250826113041if_/https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pumpanddump.asp https://web.archive.org/web/20250826113041if_/https://www.in...
neilv 1y ago
You could run this business like a protection racket, to drive demand to your service, where you can then provide unencrypted traffic of much of the Internet to other parties.
ccakes 1y ago
If you're a normal person in a country that Cloudflare considers "scammy" - your internet experience is very different from someone based in the US. Your personal online behaviour is irrelevant
jesterson 1y ago
> the internet was worse without Cloudflare Thats a very bold statement, would you mind elaborating it?
Gud 1y ago
No it wasn’t. The internet peaked in 2005, or whatever year Firefox had the most popularity. It’s only been downhill from there. The internet was a lot better place before American mega corporations took total control. It was mostly neighborhood bulletin boards, fan zines and the occasional shop. Today there is only bots, bots, bots, political lunatics and influencers dumbing down future generations.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  "Today there is only bots, bots, bots, political lunatics and influencers dumbing down future generations." seems like its people problem not the internet problem are you blaming knife too when someone use it to kill people????
  - Gud 1y ago
    No.
qmr 1y ago
Ah yes I love when half the internet falls over because everyone is mindlessly relying on a black box they have no control or understanding of.
stefantalpalaru 1y ago
[dead]
drtgh 1y ago
> the internet was worse without Cloudflare Cloudflare acts as a proxy for dynamic content, thereby slowing down the internet. Their existence (and success) suggests a lack of infrastructure or solutions (ie. DDOS, CDN) from data centers on their own and by default, what is... sad, as if the data centers were falling asleep without adapting to the times. Soon we may have this picture: User > ISP > VPN (or proxy) > Cloudflare (proxy) > Server. Intermediaries are slowness... and in the case of Cloudflare sniffing if they want (if they manage the TLS certs).
- h33t-l4x0r 1y ago
  Hmm, I don't know where you get that takeaway. For me, it's an edge cache, so it speeds up the internet. It sits between user and origin, often many hops closer, and serves content cached according to rules set by customer. When you're a CF customer they send you reports on how much bandwidth origin is saving and for me, historically, it's been most of it. And they do all of it for free most of the time! There's not a lot of cloud providers that I will endorse highly, but I have only love for Cloudflare. It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice.
  - drtgh 1y ago
    Cache of static content, ie. images, css, js or an static html, the CDNs purpose, to shorten location. At moment you serve dynamic content, you are literally redirecting the request through an intermediary server (from Cloudflare/Homologous to the original server and come back, they are acting as a proxy). This results in a slowdown of the internet. In fact, it's easy to tell when a regularly visited site has changed and put Cloudflare in between, because it takes longer to load. > It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice. Only if you put extra care trying to hide tracks. But certainly it keeps script kiddies from knowing origin's ip, what it is the only one nice feature. Datacenters should deal with this, but their passivity over the years seems to know no bounds.
    - cryptonym 1y ago
      CDN (can't say specifically about Cloudflare but that's true for other) may allow picking faster routes than BGP (BGP tends to optimize cost rather than perf), sometimes better compression than Origin on the path, and fast handshakes at Edge with already hot connections towards Origin. Edgecomputing can also help accelerating dynamic content.
CaptainOfCoit 1y ago
> To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Who here remembers exactly the same being said by large swaths of the "technologist" community about Google starting the development of Chrome and Chromium? It's usually good until it isn't. It's still a company that has to make profits, so when the moment comes when they have to chose between "making money" and "provide good service", we all know what choice companies tend to lean towards.
dotancohen 1y ago
> To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. Internet had problems before Cloudflare, but for the most part it was useable. Now, suddenly I've been getting IP blocked by Cloudflare on large swaths of websites. Cloudflare is a monopoly when you're a user trying to get to a website.
marginalia_nu 1y ago
So far Cloudflare have generally been good guys on the web. They're in an incredibly abusable position, but so far have refrained from doing that. So far. The problem with Cloudflare is that institutions change over time. It's a slow process, doesn't happen overnight, but it does happen to almost all of them sooner or later. Building institutions that stay good is one of the big unsolved problems for humanity. The problem with Cloudflare is what happens the day this good guy MITM:ing half of the web is no longer a good guy. We need to at least have a plan for dealing with this scenario, because otherwise this could get very ugly.
- NotHereNotThere 1y ago
  Let's see what we discover during the next NSA leak.
  - marginalia_nu 1y ago
    You can probably safely assume the 3-letter agencies are snooping on this data. It is and has always been very hard to resist government pressure. Happens all around the world, China, Russia, EU; all the geopolitical players find various means of eavesdropping where they can. Also likely part of why ECH is taking such incredibly long time to see widespread adoption and why it's still quite a shit solution to SNI. As it stands, anyone with network level access can see which websites you are visiting, despite HTTPS.
- cookiengineer 1y ago
  I've got a treat for you, cloudflare's business model moved heavily towards crime as a service during the last decades, including DDoS botnets that host their own CnCs behind cloudflare, while themselves even relaying cloudflare DNS data to DDoS cloudflare instances itself. The guy behind Crimeflare, when it was still available, tried to accumulate a dataset by running his own resolver, which filtered out domains in the zones of cloudflare's known ASNs. This was actually also part of a lawsuit against lieferando (takeaway) because they're registering domains of restaurant owners and blackmail them into using their delivery service, after they already registered the Google business entry with that cloudflare domain to a call center of Takeaway, so the actual owner of that restaurant has no chance in terms of SEO and google searches that people would find them again. Anyways, the dataset is pretty fascinating: [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210826102143/http://www.crimeflare.org:82/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210826102143/http://www.crimef... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210826103036/http://www.crimeflare.org:82/cfs.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210826103036/http://www.crimef...
GoblinSlayer 1y ago
>Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. Compete on what? I think I saw captchas on sites with google trust services certificates. It's not a google service?

surfingdino 1y ago

I started building on Cloudflare, but after their "pay us 120k or else" tactics they got famous for I decided to move code elsewhere.

NooneAtAll3 1y ago

you're right internet is made sooo much better by negating all encryption effort of the last 20 years

azemetre 1y ago

If Cloudflare is so vital to the internet, it should be nationalized for the public benefit as having a private entity with so much control over the internet is not a good thing. Corporatized control of the internet should not be encouraged.

citizenpaul 1y ago
I would say if the political environment pre 1980s was still in existence that might be true. Today that would just mean the entire thing would unravel as it ate its own tail in the race to the bottom environment we are currently in.
- azemetre 1y ago
  You can create democratic policies to thwart this. Even something as basic as nationalizing Cloudflare then forcing workplace democracy provisions on it would probably do more good for, not just the Cloudflare workers, but society writ large.
- Gormo 1y ago
  Which political environment pre-1980s do you want to go back to? 1930s? 1850s? 1760s?
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > Which political environment pre-1980s do you want to go back to? 1934 [1]. [1] https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep295/usrep295602/usrep295602.pdf https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep... Humphrey's Executor vs. United States
    - Gormo 1y ago
      I can't imagine what a court case about whether the US president has the power to unilaterally dismiss officials in executive-branch agencies could possibly have to do with this. At least you're referencing the United States in 1934, though. Things were very dysfunctional politically in the US at that time, but not nearly as bad as what was going on in some other parts of the world.
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > can't imagine what a court case about whether the US president has the power to unilaterally dismiss officials in executive-branch agencies could possibly have to do with this Seriously? You don't see the relevance of independent agencies to this discussion?
        Gormo 1y ago
        No. And the dynamics of inter-branch checks and balances within the US federal government aren't directly relevant to the question of whether the federal government as a whole is a reliable institution in the first place (nb: it isn't).
        JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > the dynamics of inter-branch checks and balances within the US federal government aren't directly relevant to the question of whether the federal government as a whole is a reliable institution in the first place You don’t see a reliability difference between a self-moderating and unmoderated system? Do you see any value in QC?
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
Can't believe if you are joking or not. I trust a corporation more than I trust the nation you want it nationalized in (America?) EU maybe. But yes I don't want cloudflare to be part of america after patriotic acts and all the dystopia. Honestly, cloudflare is not so vital to the internet. Like, The only thing its gonna be a problem if they stop working without giving any way to migrate. Then yes, its gonna be a bit of problem to the internet.
- encom 1y ago
  >cloudflare is not so vital to the internet Really? Try distrusting CF certs, and see how much of your internet activity breaks. CF certs should be distrusted, because it's MITM by definition. At the very least, I'd like an addon that makes the URL bar bright red, so I know my connection isn't secure.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    It's not more vital, than, say, AWS. Blocking AWS certs/endpoints will break your internet too. Though arguably neither should be in a position to do so without being regulate as a public utility
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      Yup, I also meant the same when I was writing my comment and although I agree about regulation, the thing is, that I don't even trust that aspect... Also, I know that there are sometimes where cloudflare sits in the middle between your servers and your users for DDOS protection, and so yes theoretically its a point of interception but given how their whole thing is security, I doubt that they would exploit it but yes its a point of concern. On the other hand, if something like this does happen, migrating can be easier or on the same level if something like this happened on like AWS. But cloudflare still feels safer than AWS y'know? That being said, I am all in for some regulations as a public utility but not nationalizing it as the GP comment suggested. Just some regulations would be nice but honestly we are in a bit of tough spot and maybe it was the necessity of the internet to have something like cloudflare to prevent DDOS's.
Gormo 1y ago
To make sure I understand, your position is that anything vitally important to the internet should not be under the control of a plurality of institutions subject to heterogenous incentive structures, but instead should be under the centralized, monopolistic control of a single institution that is perpetually compromised by perverse incentives and ulterior motives, whose mechanisms of accountability are mostly performative and demonstrably broken? I'm not sure that sounds like a good idea, if that's what you're saying.
- azemetre 1y ago
  My position is that if something becomes critical it should be under democratic constraints in a democratic society and not private enterprises that have no forms of control by the populace. Maybe if Cloudflare had workplace democracy my concerns would be different, but they don't and wield too much power. If it also helps I also think 99.99% of big tech should be broken up into separate, probably a few 100, different companies. So yes, anything vital for the internet should be controlled by the people through democratic norms, institutions, and values rather than dictatorships by those with money over those with none.
  - Gormo 1y ago
    No such thing as "democratic constraints" or "democratic society" at the level you're discussing. Democracy is an imperfect safeguard against certain types of extreme dysfunction of the political system -- a necessary one for sure, but not nearly sufficient to make the institutions it applies to trustworthy with monopolistic control over other aspects of society. Everything reduces to specific people acting on their a priori motivations in bounded contexts, and any system of centralized control is guaranteed to enable expressions of the worst motivations of the people involved. The distinctions you're making -- "private" vs. "public", "corporations" vs. "governments", etc. -- are fundamentally meaningless. There are no "democratic norms", just norms adhered to by specific people and the factions they form, contesting against each other for power over others. Performative "democracy" is often just cover to allow the currently dominant factions to function as "dictatorships". Decentralization and individual autonomy are the only solution to the problems you rightly care about, but what you're proposing is literally the opposite of that.

mrbluecoat 1y ago

Arguably, ecommerce was worse without Amazon but are we really better off?

busymom0 1y ago
Shipping times are definitely better off industry wide because of Amazon.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  Same day shipping was always the norm here. Order something before 14:00 - 16:00, depending on where the company was on the route for package pickups, and you'd have your package the next day. Amazon has normalized multi-day / weeks shipping, so they've made it worse.
  - gruez 1y ago
    Where is this?
    - mrweasel 1y ago
      Denmark, there is no close Amazon warehouse, so shipping always suck. Not only is shipping times frequently a week or more, it's also overpriced and items are frequently less expensive from local online stores. Amazons only advantage is it's massive selection, if you can find what you're looking for.
      - 0x457 1y ago
        In the US, it's the opposite. If you order directly from the brand, you get multi-day or more often multi-week delivery times. Unless they are using amazon logistic and which case it's the same as buying off amazon - 0/1/2-day delivery times.
        nulbyte 1y ago

kalaksi 1y ago

> At least they’re not selling ads using your data. Yet. Since it's an american company with an ever-growing influence, I dread and expect that to change, among other things, down the road. I assume the three-letter agencies also already MITM the traffic.

nenenejej 1y ago
Assume your beloved tech company can be bought by Oracle and proceed on that basis.
- galphanet 1y ago
  You forgot about Broadcom !

riedel 1y ago

CDNs always existed IMHO. The world before cloudflare was just much more hidden. In general I find their take at the typical cloud business from a network perspective mostly refreshing. However, I guess they have become the major player now and certainly try to optimize the world towards their business model. IMHO it needs other enterprises entering the competition. Maybe it could be new more software defined mobile network providers offering edge compute. Maybe data from IoT could never enter the Internet and we could have some confidential computing power when we need it for our IoT stuff. Maybe we could get a more decentralized Internet again...

motorest 1y ago
> However, I guess they have become the major player now and certainly try to optimize the world towards their business model. I don't think that's it, and I think the explanation is much more simple and straight-forward. Cloudflare established a very successful business model around a straight-forward, very transparent, no-bullshit CDN. Now, they started offering other cloud services build around their CDN. Cloudflare Workers kind of extend their CDN pipeline to allow clients to run arbitrary code to customize caching logic, but it turns out their function-as-a-service model is exceptionally good, and higher-level services like email are a low-effort way to meet existing needs.
- gpi 1y ago
  Cloudflare is far from a no bullshit CDN. The vendor lock in is real with an aggressive unethcial sales model.
  - vel0city 1y ago
    I'm not entirely aware of all their products, but just thinking about a CDN, isn't that in many ways kind of fungible? Is it really that hard to migrate to your big cloud co's CDN (CloudFront, Google Cloud CDN) or the several other large competitors without an immense amount of work? Please, educate me and tell me what's up.
    - 1y ago

makeitdouble 1y ago

I think the point is to keep them in that mindset, and that requires competition and some counterbalance that won't be there is everyone just moves to Cloudflare.

immibis 1y ago

If CF limited their clients to big businesses (just like Akamai and who else?) it might be less bad, but as it is, they're trying to get the whole internet including small sites on board.

mrweasel 1y ago

I still believe that CloudFlare means well, but that doesn't mean that I agree with the increased centralization. This isn't the fault of CloudFlare, they are just exploiting a business opportunity and as you say: At least they're not selling ads. It is a legitimate business, from my perspective. I'd just wish we weren't in a situation where CloudFlare isn't exactly struggling to sell their services.

motorest 1y ago
> I still believe that CloudFlare means well, but that doesn't mean that I agree with the increased centralization. I'm perplexed by this sort of comment. Cloudflare doesn't even feature in the top 10 of cloud provider market share, and the number 8 spot already reports 2%. And here you are, complaining about Cloudflare and centralization. Furthermore, AWS is by far the biggest cloud provider, reporting around 30% market share, and I don't see AWS being referred as a concern.
- mrweasel 1y ago
  20% of websites uses CloudFlare(1, 2), even companies that use AWS, GCP and Azure have their services behind CloudFlare. 1) https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/13/cloudflare_2024_review/ https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/13/cloudflare_2024_revie... 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudflare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudflare

segmondy 1y ago

The internet is worse for me with Cloudflare. I'm using a cellphone router for my internet. My guess is I don't get a dedicated IP and probably behind a NAT with other users. 85% of my request needs me to solve a cloudflare captcha. on bad days I have to do this easily 100+ times.

hnav 1y ago
Have you played with IPv6 vs IPv4? Wonder what's worse there, CGNAT-ed IPv4 or an inherently low-reputation IPv6.
gruez 1y ago
But what's the counterfactual? People use cloudflare because they want protection from ddos attacks and bots. If cloudflare didn't exist there would probably be similar measures.
- TeMPOraL 1y ago
  Businesses want to protect the continuity of their business operations, and to that end they buy such protection as a service, from a business that managed to MitM half the Internet in order to provide such service. Point being, it's a commercial subverting the Internet from inside, reshaping it to better serve the interests of commerce. It is indeed protection, but it's accomplished by reducing variance. 99% of legitimate commerce on the Internet follows the same patterns, use a small subset of possibilities offered by the technology - so why not just block the remaining 1% that doesn't fit and call it a day? It will stop most of the threats to running businesses on the Internet. The 1% of legitimate commerce that doesn't fit the pattern? It's not being ignored per se, just pressured to adapt and conform to the majority. What is being ignored is that the Internet is not just a place of commerce, and non-commercial use cases, ideas such as empowering people to better their lives, are gradually becoming impossible, as fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them. Some of us still remember the Internet being more than just a virtual mall, and are unhappy about it gradually becoming one. And it's not like CloudFlare, et al. are hostile to non-commercial interests as a matter of principle - it's just out of scope for them.

sssilver 1y ago

> At least they’re not selling ads using your data Sounds great, until a new CEO steps in. Any company is exactly one (or more often zero) CEO away from doing whatever they want (within legal constraints) with their business, in order to fulfill their fiduciary duty (and greed).

eastdakota 1y ago
I’m not going anywhere anytime soon.
- rcakebread 1y ago
  How do you know?
  - akimbostrawman 1y ago
    Probably asked his handler
- mike_d 1y ago
  I am genuinely curious what protections are in place to ensure that? What is the plan after you are gone? It looks like you have voting shares with 10x the power of institutional investors, but activist investors aren't dumb either. My biggest fear of Cloudflare has always been that one day you'll get hit by a bus and someone will figure out that merging Cloudflare with an ad network would create so much more shareholder value. The road to hell is paved with free DDoS mitigation, so to speak.
- anonyfox 1y ago
  Huge fan of Cloudflare here actually. It’s always such a breath of fresh air compared to the heavyweight configuration hells like AWS. And for doing super convenient stuff like make node:http work on cloud functions recently, but guess only certain DevOps guys realize how cool that is compared to other FaaS wrapping ceremonies. Too bad you don’t hire senior folks in Germany currently, would probably join in a heartbeat for emotional reasons alone. Keep going, lightweight features on a tap and solid reliability over years is exactly what I need and want at least.

betaby 1y ago

> To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare It was better. 'Wget' and 'links' worked with most of the sites.

ezfe 1y ago
wget isn't supposed to work on these sites. They've chosen Cloudflare and asked them to do this.
- stingraycharles 1y ago
  That’s exactly the part that people forget: all these policies are decided to be applied by the website owners. It started with DDoS blocking and they just extended it to more things. I feel like people here are forgetting the fact just how hostile bad actors on the internet are / can be.
  - GoblinSlayer 1y ago
    How website owners enable infinite captcha?
  - fragmede 1y ago
    That brings up opt-in vs opt-out tho, and last time I looked, Cloudflare defaulted to automatically signing website owners for it. That is to say, if you just mash next, Cloudflare blocks "AI", whatever that means.

jasonvorhe 1y ago

I don't know what kind of internet you used but mine didn't randomly decide to block my access to a website because some quasi monopolist decided I wasn't allowed to use a certain website for intransparent reasons.

troyvit 1y ago
Being blocked from a web site and having to hit a little box are two different things. Are you talking about the former or the latter? If it's the former ... that has literally never happened to me unless I'm on a VPN and even then it's rarely (if ever) CF that's doing the blocking. If it's the latter then it reflects the sad truth that we can't have nice things anymoret. I have lots of problems with the accessibility of that box, but either Cloudflare would be implementing it, somebody else would be implementing it, or a huge chunk of data would be unavailable to you anyway because of accidental DDoS attacks caused by irresponsibly deployed bots.
- forgotmypw17 1y ago
  This has happened for me on regular residential Internet access. (Check the box, and get redirected to check the box again.)
  - reitanuki 1y ago
    I hit this too, maybe on the order of one day every month or two? I'm using a fairly mainstream ISP in a fairly mainstream country. I don't get why I seem to have such a hard time. I've kept the same IP for months. But the worst thing overall is that it just doesn't acknowledge it. Want to block me? OK. But tell me that! Don't just make me tick a box again and again and untick it. It's infuriating.
- inetknght 1y ago
  > Being blocked from a web site and having to hit a little box are two different things. Maybe for you. But I don't let random unvetted websites run code on my computer. Checking that box requires it.

bogwog 1y ago

> Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. Not to comment on whether they're actually a monopoly or not (since idk much about CF's market share, except that it's big), but how does this prove they aren't a monopoly? If anything, it'd work as evidence to prove that they are.

egorfine 1y ago

> the internet was worse without Cloudflare It had much more freedom. Currently it's up to Cloudflare to decide whether you will read that article or not. Tomorrow some stupid law will mandate certain ideas to be hidden from children[1] and Cloudflare will happily comply. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

zenmac 1y ago
For example, recently certain big corp ask me to verify something. I clicked on the link in the E-Mail and it was suck on Cloudflare the click button over and over again. No matter how many times I clicked. Do I need to find another internet access now?
- paulgb 1y ago
  I would bet in the direction of this being a bug on big corp's side rather than Cloudflare's.
  - viraptor 1y ago
    No, it's a common issue. A bit of traffic is always misclassified and one day you'll be the unlucky one. And there's nothing you can do about it beyond trying different device on a different network.
- miki123211 1y ago
  You need to become more like a "normal person." No VPN (unless your ISP is extremely shady, then do use a VPN or change ISP), no overly zealous adblock (ublock origin on default settings should be fine), no JS blocking / weird privacy extensions / whatever, nno PiHole, just what your average, relatively tech-savvy geek would use. HN readerships's problems with Cloudflare are mostly their own fault. "normal" internet users don't have these problems[1]. [1] except for people in specific countries, and I do feel sorry for those.
  - 1y ago

t_mahmood 1y ago

We said the same thing with Google, "Don't be evil", "They are better than MS", now here we are, Google, became something that doing everything to squeeze every data off us, so that they can sell them to their partners. And, anything that stops them from doing it, well, you are kind of erased from the Internet. The freedom we had, slowly becoming non-existent now. Corporates have one and only one target. It is to make money. And this mentality, enables them.

gundmc 1y ago
Google doesn't sell data, they sell ads

stevenfoster 1y ago

Yet…

ies7 1y ago

These sentences are what I would used to describe Google 10 years ago.

viraptor 1y ago

There are other services, but CloudFlare is too well known. They're close to monopoly in the DDoS protection business unfortunately. But we still have a choice and for long-term success we should be choosing other companies where possible.

HaZeust 1y ago

>" Google is in a perfect position to compete *but they don’t* [emphasis mine], so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something." That is how it works LOL, just because someone only has the capacity to compete with a monopoly doesn't mean that the monopoly has competition.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I'm fine with it." Cloudflare not only blocking IA but asking for money on behalf of the website operator, as a "service" https://web.archive.org/web/20250920180605if_/https://www.theverge.com/news/773928/google-open-web-rapid-decline https://web.archive.org/web/20250920180605if_/https://www.th...

542458 1y ago
That's the site owner demanding payment via cloudflare, not cloudflare unilaterally deciding to charge money (as far as I can tell at least). https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/ Looks like The Verge either set up an excessively tight pay-per-crawl policy or doesn't want IA scraping their stuff.
- incoming1211 1y ago
  Cloudflare enabled blocking by default. People were on X complaining about it.
  - thephyber 1y ago
    Blocking access to everyone or to scraping crawlers? They have detailed stats about the behavior of all visitors, including how bot-like they are and how likely they are to scrape your (their users’) content.
stingraycharles 1y ago
Cloudflare offers a service to website owners to do that, yes. It’s the owners’ decision if they want to monetize on the content. Is it that bad that Cloudflare offers people these choices?
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
Not restricted to CF https://web.archive.org/web/20250826113041if_/https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pumpanddump.asp https://web.archive.org/web/20250826113041if_/https://www.in...

neilv 1y ago

You could run this business like a protection racket, to drive demand to your service, where you can then provide unencrypted traffic of much of the Internet to other parties.

ccakes 1y ago

If you're a normal person in a country that Cloudflare considers "scammy" - your internet experience is very different from someone based in the US. Your personal online behaviour is irrelevant

jesterson 1y ago

> the internet was worse without Cloudflare Thats a very bold statement, would you mind elaborating it?

Gud 1y ago

No it wasn’t. The internet peaked in 2005, or whatever year Firefox had the most popularity. It’s only been downhill from there. The internet was a lot better place before American mega corporations took total control. It was mostly neighborhood bulletin boards, fan zines and the occasional shop. Today there is only bots, bots, bots, political lunatics and influencers dumbing down future generations.

tonyhart7 1y ago
"Today there is only bots, bots, bots, political lunatics and influencers dumbing down future generations." seems like its people problem not the internet problem are you blaming knife too when someone use it to kill people????
- Gud 1y ago
  No.

qmr 1y ago

Ah yes I love when half the internet falls over because everyone is mindlessly relying on a black box they have no control or understanding of.

stefantalpalaru 1y ago

[dead]

drtgh 1y ago

> the internet was worse without Cloudflare Cloudflare acts as a proxy for dynamic content, thereby slowing down the internet. Their existence (and success) suggests a lack of infrastructure or solutions (ie. DDOS, CDN) from data centers on their own and by default, what is... sad, as if the data centers were falling asleep without adapting to the times. Soon we may have this picture: User > ISP > VPN (or proxy) > Cloudflare (proxy) > Server. Intermediaries are slowness... and in the case of Cloudflare sniffing if they want (if they manage the TLS certs).

h33t-l4x0r 1y ago
Hmm, I don't know where you get that takeaway. For me, it's an edge cache, so it speeds up the internet. It sits between user and origin, often many hops closer, and serves content cached according to rules set by customer. When you're a CF customer they send you reports on how much bandwidth origin is saving and for me, historically, it's been most of it. And they do all of it for free most of the time! There's not a lot of cloud providers that I will endorse highly, but I have only love for Cloudflare. It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice.
- drtgh 1y ago
  Cache of static content, ie. images, css, js or an static html, the CDNs purpose, to shorten location. At moment you serve dynamic content, you are literally redirecting the request through an intermediary server (from Cloudflare/Homologous to the original server and come back, they are acting as a proxy). This results in a slowdown of the internet. In fact, it's easy to tell when a regularly visited site has changed and put Cloudflare in between, because it takes longer to load. > It also keeps hackers from knowing origin's ip which is nice. Only if you put extra care trying to hide tracks. But certainly it keeps script kiddies from knowing origin's ip, what it is the only one nice feature. Datacenters should deal with this, but their passivity over the years seems to know no bounds.
  - cryptonym 1y ago
    CDN (can't say specifically about Cloudflare but that's true for other) may allow picking faster routes than BGP (BGP tends to optimize cost rather than perf), sometimes better compression than Origin on the path, and fast handshakes at Edge with already hot connections towards Origin. Edgecomputing can also help accelerating dynamic content.

CaptainOfCoit 1y ago

> To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. This is one of those. Who here remembers exactly the same being said by large swaths of the "technologist" community about Google starting the development of Chrome and Chromium? It's usually good until it isn't. It's still a company that has to make profits, so when the moment comes when they have to chose between "making money" and "provide good service", we all know what choice companies tend to lean towards.

dotancohen 1y ago

> To be honest, the internet was worse without Cloudflare, so as long as they provide a good service for their customers, I’m fine with it. Internet had problems before Cloudflare, but for the most part it was useable. Now, suddenly I've been getting IP blocked by Cloudflare on large swaths of websites. Cloudflare is a monopoly when you're a user trying to get to a website.

marginalia_nu 1y ago

So far Cloudflare have generally been good guys on the web. They're in an incredibly abusable position, but so far have refrained from doing that. So far. The problem with Cloudflare is that institutions change over time. It's a slow process, doesn't happen overnight, but it does happen to almost all of them sooner or later. Building institutions that stay good is one of the big unsolved problems for humanity. The problem with Cloudflare is what happens the day this good guy MITM:ing half of the web is no longer a good guy. We need to at least have a plan for dealing with this scenario, because otherwise this could get very ugly.

NotHereNotThere 1y ago
Let's see what we discover during the next NSA leak.
- marginalia_nu 1y ago
  You can probably safely assume the 3-letter agencies are snooping on this data. It is and has always been very hard to resist government pressure. Happens all around the world, China, Russia, EU; all the geopolitical players find various means of eavesdropping where they can. Also likely part of why ECH is taking such incredibly long time to see widespread adoption and why it's still quite a shit solution to SNI. As it stands, anyone with network level access can see which websites you are visiting, despite HTTPS.
cookiengineer 1y ago
I've got a treat for you, cloudflare's business model moved heavily towards crime as a service during the last decades, including DDoS botnets that host their own CnCs behind cloudflare, while themselves even relaying cloudflare DNS data to DDoS cloudflare instances itself. The guy behind Crimeflare, when it was still available, tried to accumulate a dataset by running his own resolver, which filtered out domains in the zones of cloudflare's known ASNs. This was actually also part of a lawsuit against lieferando (takeaway) because they're registering domains of restaurant owners and blackmail them into using their delivery service, after they already registered the Google business entry with that cloudflare domain to a call center of Takeaway, so the actual owner of that restaurant has no chance in terms of SEO and google searches that people would find them again. Anyways, the dataset is pretty fascinating: [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210826102143/http://www.crimeflare.org:82/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210826102143/http://www.crimef... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210826103036/http://www.crimeflare.org:82/cfs.html https://web.archive.org/web/20210826103036/http://www.crimef...

GoblinSlayer 1y ago

>Google is in a perfect position to compete but they don’t, so it’s not like Cloudflare is a monopoly or something. Compete on what? I think I saw captchas on sites with google trust services certificates. It's not a google service?