3 ms·

It’s a bit alarming how cloudflare is establishing itself as arbiter of all things bots…both on blocking and allowing. Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as

by Havoc 3mo ago

It’s a bit alarming how cloudflare is establishing itself as arbiter of all things bots…both on blocking and allowing. Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as a whole

jppope 3mo ago
Agreed, but we should be honest, the internet today is far from healthy
ianm218 3mo ago
For any one of their product there is a good opportunity to build an open source alternative or something like it! Can be hard to work around they have the benefit of being able to have negative unit economics on lots of infra products... But people succesfully built tons of alternatives to google analytics and similar.
- esseph 3mo ago
  What they are doing requires both physical and digital infrastructure spread throughout the globe. It's not a cheap task.
  - pocksuppet 3mo ago
    Do you actually have customers spread throughout the globe, or just in North America and some in Europe?
- ralegh 3mo ago
  Open source for bot protection specifically would be difficult. If I as a bot developer can see the tests you run I can just modify my bot to pass them (either trivially or by brute force).
skybrian 3mo ago
Yes, but it’s up to their competitors to build competing services.
- cryo32 3mo ago
  I think it's up to their customers not to encourage consolidation.
  - grim_io 3mo ago
    Microsoft is the proof that customers do want that, or that they don't have a real choice.
    - cryo32 3mo ago
      I think it's simpler - they don't give a crap. Until somewhere down the line. Like when half of Spain gets cut off due to an arbitrary block on a consolidated service facade...
  - Catloafdev 3mo ago
    What Cloudflare competitors offer a similar range of services?
    - cryo32 3mo ago
      Do you really need Cloudflare's services to run your business?
      - Catloafdev 3mo ago
        Are you genuinely asking "does anybody even need any of their services"?
        cryo32 3mo ago
        Yes. I am asking exactly that objective question. They are advantageous to leverage in certain situations but essential they are not. We're used to, in the technology industry, looking for or creating problems to solve with services we are aware of. Moving back to necessity and need, do we really? Are we being objective? Most of the time, no.
Maxion 3mo ago
To be frank, their products do work and are sorely needed.
baq 3mo ago
...but very bullish NET. who wouldn't want to be the toll booth where you collect money both ways
cryo32 3mo ago
Apart from handling of abuse reports. Yeah we're acting as CDN for this phishing site - we'll just inform the upstream about it and do nothing.
hoppp 3mo ago
It's business as usual and it's our job to vote with our wallets.
Catloafdev 3mo ago
They're creating optional opt-in protection layers for the services they operate. I genuinely don't understand these generic complaint comments. Are you complaining that they offer too much? Or do you believe nobody is offering similar services?
- stuartjohnson12 3mo ago
  The complaint is that the offer is a great deal with no downsides for consumers, and this is likely to result in Cloudflare having a lot of power (which they currently don't have) as a market maker. This position as market maker would grant them the power to extract economic rent from the web economy by charging both sides of the web provider and web consumer market to get access to the other.
  - Catloafdev 3mo ago
    So the complaint is that one day they have such a strong monopoly that they can freely turn evil? Just want to make sure I understand the real issue here, because that sounds like a lot of fearmongering to me.
    - pocksuppet 3mo ago
      Uhhh, they have it right now, and they are currently being evil by blocking a lot of people from accessing a lot of websites.
    - stuartjohnson12 3mo ago
      You don't need to speculate about whether a tech company with a monopoly over a major distribution channel will extract rent from it - it's incredibly profitable to do so.
dzonga 3mo ago
have you considered the alternative ? where bots run rampant ? trust me as an operator - I'm grateful Cloudflare exists.
postalcoder 3mo ago
Gonna zag here. If you take a step back, cloudflare has been paving the path for pay for crawl. I think it's a noble and ambitious goal. While I can understand why you would be alarmed, I can point to almost two decades of lamenting on this forum about how we need better ways of rewarding content creators than ads. Well, this is it. Moreover, these products weren't built in a vacuum. Most threads about Anthropic and OpenAI have complaints about how these companies were built on stolen content. There's a reality we have to face here and we can't have it both ways.
- halJordan 3mo ago
  Is it a better way though? The problem with ads has always been their abusive nature. From unrestrained pop ups and clickjacking in the 90s to today's pervasive surveillance and profiling. Cloudflare turnstile is a pop up. This product is pervasive surveillance. It having a cf logo doesn't change that or ameliorate the many many abuses that two decades have shown are part and parcel.
- RedRocketFlash 3mo ago
  What's incredible is that you have businesses paying CloudFlare to stop their content being ingested by AIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Self-operated scrapers). And at the same time, they're paying SEO experts to make that same content easier to be ingested by systems (Google and other Search Engines) which use it for their own AI offerings. Are you going to be able to make your online content available to Google Search but unavailable for Google Gemini?
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    Yes. Google obeys robots.txt. Set yours to disallow Google-Extended and they won't train Gemini on it.
whatjustin 3mo ago
Unfortunately a common occurrence in the world. Not really a fan of cloudflare selling to both sides.
LoganDark 3mo ago
It's really telling that they're starting to block anything automated ever that hasn't gone through their ID verification process. It's like literally every company that exists in the world is taking advantage of the dystopia at once
- mark212 3mo ago
  no, they're giving tools to their customers who can choose freely to block or not block bots. Without those tools, the people who run sites and offer content are just flying blind. I struggle to see how this is a bad thing in any way
  - LoganDark 3mo ago
    My issue is with them defaulting every site to blocking any bot that hasn't gone through their verification process. It's not about the existence of the setting, but rather the behavior to enforce it by default.

by Havoc 3mo ago

It’s a bit alarming how cloudflare is establishing itself as arbiter of all things bots…both on blocking and allowing. Doesn’t seem healthy for the internet as a whole

jppope 3mo ago

Agreed, but we should be honest, the internet today is far from healthy

ianm218 3mo ago

For any one of their product there is a good opportunity to build an open source alternative or something like it! Can be hard to work around they have the benefit of being able to have negative unit economics on lots of infra products... But people succesfully built tons of alternatives to google analytics and similar.

esseph 3mo ago
What they are doing requires both physical and digital infrastructure spread throughout the globe. It's not a cheap task.
- pocksuppet 3mo ago
  Do you actually have customers spread throughout the globe, or just in North America and some in Europe?
ralegh 3mo ago
Open source for bot protection specifically would be difficult. If I as a bot developer can see the tests you run I can just modify my bot to pass them (either trivially or by brute force).

skybrian 3mo ago

Yes, but it’s up to their competitors to build competing services.

cryo32 3mo ago
I think it's up to their customers not to encourage consolidation.
- grim_io 3mo ago
  Microsoft is the proof that customers do want that, or that they don't have a real choice.
  - cryo32 3mo ago
    I think it's simpler - they don't give a crap. Until somewhere down the line. Like when half of Spain gets cut off due to an arbitrary block on a consolidated service facade...
- Catloafdev 3mo ago
  What Cloudflare competitors offer a similar range of services?
  - cryo32 3mo ago
    Do you really need Cloudflare's services to run your business?
    - Catloafdev 3mo ago
      Are you genuinely asking "does anybody even need any of their services"?
      - cryo32 3mo ago
        Yes. I am asking exactly that objective question. They are advantageous to leverage in certain situations but essential they are not. We're used to, in the technology industry, looking for or creating problems to solve with services we are aware of. Moving back to necessity and need, do we really? Are we being objective? Most of the time, no.

Maxion 3mo ago

To be frank, their products do work and are sorely needed.

baq 3mo ago

...but very bullish NET. who wouldn't want to be the toll booth where you collect money both ways

cryo32 3mo ago

Apart from handling of abuse reports. Yeah we're acting as CDN for this phishing site - we'll just inform the upstream about it and do nothing.

hoppp 3mo ago

It's business as usual and it's our job to vote with our wallets.

Catloafdev 3mo ago

They're creating optional opt-in protection layers for the services they operate. I genuinely don't understand these generic complaint comments. Are you complaining that they offer too much? Or do you believe nobody is offering similar services?

stuartjohnson12 3mo ago
The complaint is that the offer is a great deal with no downsides for consumers, and this is likely to result in Cloudflare having a lot of power (which they currently don't have) as a market maker. This position as market maker would grant them the power to extract economic rent from the web economy by charging both sides of the web provider and web consumer market to get access to the other.
- Catloafdev 3mo ago
  So the complaint is that one day they have such a strong monopoly that they can freely turn evil? Just want to make sure I understand the real issue here, because that sounds like a lot of fearmongering to me.
  - pocksuppet 3mo ago
    Uhhh, they have it right now, and they are currently being evil by blocking a lot of people from accessing a lot of websites.
  - stuartjohnson12 3mo ago
    You don't need to speculate about whether a tech company with a monopoly over a major distribution channel will extract rent from it - it's incredibly profitable to do so.

dzonga 3mo ago

have you considered the alternative ? where bots run rampant ? trust me as an operator - I'm grateful Cloudflare exists.

postalcoder 3mo ago

Gonna zag here. If you take a step back, cloudflare has been paving the path for pay for crawl. I think it's a noble and ambitious goal. While I can understand why you would be alarmed, I can point to almost two decades of lamenting on this forum about how we need better ways of rewarding content creators than ads. Well, this is it. Moreover, these products weren't built in a vacuum. Most threads about Anthropic and OpenAI have complaints about how these companies were built on stolen content. There's a reality we have to face here and we can't have it both ways.

halJordan 3mo ago
Is it a better way though? The problem with ads has always been their abusive nature. From unrestrained pop ups and clickjacking in the 90s to today's pervasive surveillance and profiling. Cloudflare turnstile is a pop up. This product is pervasive surveillance. It having a cf logo doesn't change that or ameliorate the many many abuses that two decades have shown are part and parcel.
RedRocketFlash 3mo ago
What's incredible is that you have businesses paying CloudFlare to stop their content being ingested by AIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Self-operated scrapers). And at the same time, they're paying SEO experts to make that same content easier to be ingested by systems (Google and other Search Engines) which use it for their own AI offerings. Are you going to be able to make your online content available to Google Search but unavailable for Google Gemini?
- fragmede 3mo ago
  Yes. Google obeys robots.txt. Set yours to disallow Google-Extended and they won't train Gemini on it.

whatjustin 3mo ago

Unfortunately a common occurrence in the world. Not really a fan of cloudflare selling to both sides.

LoganDark 3mo ago

It's really telling that they're starting to block anything automated ever that hasn't gone through their ID verification process. It's like literally every company that exists in the world is taking advantage of the dystopia at once

mark212 3mo ago
no, they're giving tools to their customers who can choose freely to block or not block bots. Without those tools, the people who run sites and offer content are just flying blind. I struggle to see how this is a bad thing in any way
- LoganDark 3mo ago
  My issue is with them defaulting every site to blocking any bot that hasn't gone through their verification process. It's not about the existence of the setting, but rather the behavior to enforce it by default.