Look, this is a great business strategy.

The first point is data for a reason - the amount of traffic they see enables them to train models with capabilities beyond what the competition can do.

With free tiers it's harder for competition to break into market as they'll need to convince customers that they are getting more for the money than Cloudflare offers for free. Then see point one about data.

Sadly, this creates a choke point for the internet. When Cloudflare is down, "nothing" works. This used to be a problem, but if you're big enough, it's treated like a weather event. See AWS us-east-1 outages, I doubt anyone was compensated for the outage.

So yeah, Cloudflare has a great position.

What worries me is that AI data endpoint they're crafting. I don't think it's good idea that anyone has a hold of that much data.

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rudedogg 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Also, the threat to privacy. If I turn on iCloud Private Relay I get bombarded with CloudFlare captchas. It’s so annoying I sometimes turn it off just for that reason.

Having some all knowing entity running the internet has a lot of downsides.

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stingraycharles 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is something the owners of the website can configure. Private relay actually uses Cloudflare exit nodes, but if the website owner decides to configure their site with maximum protection, captchas is what you’ll get.

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ArcHound 3 hours ago | parent [-]

There are two caveats though:

1) users gave to configure this and not all will 2) you have to trust Cloudflare

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tick_tock_tick 2 hours ago | parent [-]

They are using Apple private relay; they are already trusting Cloudflare.

	▲	ArcHound 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And that's the other thing - how can you be sure which parties you have to trust to use a service? We, tech people can sometimes figure it out. The normal consumer doesn't really have a chance.

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sroussey 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I run iCloud private relay and I get very few of their captchas. Actually, I think they are concentrated on just a couple of sites.

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tourmalinetaco 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, it’s practically every website for me, and sometimes even on my bare IP.

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tourmalinetaco 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Also, if a legal group is considered verboten by CF then they’re incredibly susceptible to DDoS, and there are realistically no alternatives due to that. It creates an avenue for private censorship. It also creates a double standard where illegal websites are allowed (despite being actively reported to both CF and law enforcement), while legal websites that are “unattractive” aren’t.

	▲	ArcHound 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A similar idea in the other direction: Cloudflare can effectively block access to internet for selected groups. This might be lawfully required by USA at one point or another for now obvious reasons.