your comment actually made me think about this, cloudflare hasn't actually turned full monopolist... yet, their generous free tier has led to monopoly like market share but the pain society feels is when they go down, they haven't turned the screw to make monopoly (or hyperscaler) profits

They and Prince may never go that way, as someone who occasionally picked SaaS/infra stocks, the ratio of their market share/customers metrics to revenues/profit vs other peers was always on the low side (haven't look at their numbers in a while tho)

Some parallels to gmail, which similarly rose to dominance by offering a free tier that was leagues above what everyone else was offering. They were also hailed as the savior, followed by a period of disillusionment. Now plenty of competitors have caught up with almost-as-good free offerings, but the world is still much more centralized than it was before