Remix.run Logo
acdha 2 days ago

Google’s monopoly is dangerous because they linked success in search to dominance in other areas, and especially the most popular web browser.

I wouldn’t recommend trusting any large company but so far Cloudflare doesn’t appear to be pulling a Google because they sell directly rather than to third parties. Google never charged for search so they ended up doing a reverse acquisition into DoubleClick to get advertisers to pay for the searches we do. Cloudflare does have a free tier but their paid services are decidedly not free and since they have serious competition in the CDN business, zero-trust, etc. they have the direct incentive not to screw their customers which Google lacked. I’d get worried if that ever changes.

lapcat 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Google’s monopoly is dangerous because they linked success in search to dominance in other areas

That's precisely what's happening here: Cloudflare is leveraging its CDN dominance to become a kind of payment processor for the internet.

> they have serious competition in the CDN business

Do they? I just said they have 80% market share.

> they have the direct incentive not to screw their customers which Google lacked

Google Search is free service for users but a paid service for advertisers. The advertisers are Google's customers. Theoretically, Google has an incentive not to screw its customers, but practically they can, because of their search monopoly.

visarga 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Cloudflare is leveraging its CDN dominance to become a kind of payment processor for the internet

Seems like the moment is ripe for this move. In recent news Google partnered with stablecoins and traditional payment processors to create an agent-to-agent micropayment system (AP2)

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/a...