Cloudflare is most active in pushing standards, and highlighting the issue of bots scraping web pages for free. That said, the other major CDNs (e.g. Akamai, Fastly) also have Bot Management functionality, so hopefully this is not a gatekeeping scenario, more of a standards-building scenario.

In some positive news today, Cloudflare is sponsoring the Ladybird browser effort:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332860

That's not nothing.

That feels like a bog basic false choice fallacy.

That is a lot of hands... Are you AI generated? lol =3

> On the other hand, adding more gatekeepers to the web ends up killing it.

LOL, what?

Nothing in Google's search monopoly challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to complete...

From the stats I've seen, Cloudflare has an 80% market share for reverse proxy services. 20% of all websites use Cloudflare, 50% of the most popular websites globally. That's a dangerous amount of concentration, and it's the only reason Cloudflare can propose this new business model for the internet and be taken seriously.

It could be interesting to build a small startup that identifies hate speech on Twitter, Threads, Blue Sky, and other platforms.

I envision a UI that displays the message and, in a sidebar, lists what aspects of the message classify it as hate speech. Then, like a spam filter, you could decide to block the message.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1084806... https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01577 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03346

But everything in their idea challenges the idea of the Internet as a public-ish good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

It's not impossible. But it's hard.

Also weird that they think reddit is something other than ragebait. I avoid reddit as much as I can, because everytime I go there the reddit feed is full of some of the worst ragebait on the internet.

They are all platforms: news companies, publishing houses, ISPs, recording labels, YouTube, Google, Meta, TikTok, Windows, App Store, Play Store, Amazon.. and as platforms they squeeze both the layer above and the one below, their customers and their providers.

You know what that looks like? rent. It looks like home owners setting rent as high as the market can bear, until it becomes almost no advantage at all to participate.

It sure looks like Cloudflare wants to be the platform for AI royalty collections. But creators, customers, sellers - they are all hostage to the platforms they can't avoid. That is where the money sink is.

How is Cloudflare a monopoly as opposed to just being popular? The CDN, security, edge compute, etc. markets all have multiple popular competitors.

I've done a few tests with CF hosted webapps... overall it's pretty good experience, and for my usage has been free, despite opting into a paid account level, I haven't exceeded the free usage.

For mostly-static or static-site content it's pretty nice all around. I've not gotten into the SQLite service so much though, which I might and seems interesting.. there's also Turso to consider as an alternative option... Not to mention Deno, Fastly and other similar options.

Kind of hoping to see something similar start to gain traction to support wasm backend systems similarly.

This is beyond their DDoS/Proxy protection, but worth considering as part of what they offer. There's a lot there to like.

> To be fair to apple, many billion dollar businesses have been built for and distributed by the app store.

This sentence is missing something essential:

Many billion dollar businesses have been built for iPhone and distributed by the app store.

iPhone is the platform, whereas App Store is merely the exclusive method of software distribution as dictated by Apple. Contrast with the Apple Mac, where the App Store is not the exclusive method of software distribution.