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.

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.

I think Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) are a way to try and solve that problem.

I recently switched to Kagi and their Orion browser, and that's when I learned about PBCs.

A PBC legally takes a triple mandate, the first is just as any for-profit corp, to maximize shareholder value, the second is to the benefit of the stakeholders, and the last can be anything they write down when they register as a PBC. The Delaware law says:

> The board of directors shall manage or direct the business and affairs of the public benefit corporation in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the specific public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.

If they fail at any of these mandates, you can sue them.

That means they are still for-profit, but also can't decide to favor profit over their other mandate or change their mind. Their other mandate being stakeholders interests, like users, as well as the explicitly stated benefit. For Kagi, that benefit is:

> Kagi is committed to creating a more human-centric and sustainable web that benefits individuals, communities, and society as a whole, with a transparent business model that aligns the incentives of everyone involved.

Now it's not all roses, Anthropic I learned is another PBC. Their benefit is:

> the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity

Which is quite vague, and can be taken in many directions.

But overall, it's much better than normal corporations, because here they are legally obligated to care about stockholder, stakeholder, and some additionally specific "public benefit".

That's ahistoric. Democratic governments are correlated with a _decrease_ in violent conflict.

Determining if traffic is genuine requires the user to completely and totally give up privacy.

I compare Cloudflare to border control. Open up your bag. Answer the questions. Present your papers.

I am. Try to browse anonymously. On the modern internet you're no longer allowed to do this.

Cloudflare can't determine who you are? No website for you.

> Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing

What ridiculous statement.

Or CF could just do better caching, which was their original reason for existence.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.