I concur and have been talking about this for a while.

The fact is, Cloudflare is a man-in-the-middle. That's their focus, that's their purpose.

They will limit your local crawler from accessing pages. They will demand you use their crawler.

They will decrypt your traffic if they get a warrant. They always decrypt your traffic anyway, but they will give it to state actors if they demand it.

That's not to say anyone should break the laws, but the issue right now is that intellectual property is incompatible with what is coming with AI.

I don't hate on Cloudflare because it's a bad service. It's actually pretty good, but the fundamental problem is they make their purpose to be a single choke point of all data on the Web.

That's not right. It never was.

Careful I posted something similar in another Cloudfare thread and people threw at me like lions.

They don't see anything wrong with one entity controlling most of the internet traffic

>They will limit your local crawler from accessing pages. They will demand you use their crawler.

Source? According to cloudflare, their crawling service don't get any special treatment from their WAF/CDN.