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(I'm ex CF) This is backwards. Nobody "allowed" anyting. CF serves a customers need. You can argue with the solution but you can't argue with the core problem.
by majke 3mo ago
(I'm ex CF) This is backwards. Nobody "allowed" anyting. CF serves a customers need. You can argue with the solution but you can't argue with the core problem. It's more healthy to start the conversation of _why_ CF services are valuable.
- EnergyAmy 3mo agoNo, it's more healthy to start the conversation on why we allow corporations to do bad things with excuses like "just serving customer's needs"
- oytis 3mo agoI don't get it, what is bad about what they are doing? People need a CDN, they choose the one they find the best.
- bluefirebrand 3mo agoCF's current position in the internet is way larger than "serves a customer's need"
- thejazzman 3mo agoCF's customer is the website that elected to put CF in-between you and them
- Groxx 3mo agoI think it counts as "allowed" regardless of utility. CF is so massively over-weight on the internet that it's impossible to trust them with anything because if they can be forced to do something by a hostile government (hint: they can be!) then they can get away with it invisibly and affect billions of people. That is something that should not be allowed to exist. It's one of the reasons monopolies (or even majority-opolies) are bad. It's a weapon hanging on the wall, waiting to be used.
- epistasis 3mo agoThen I think the real question is why haven't any serious competitors emerged that can handle the essential services that Cloudflare provides? Are there network effects like what happens with Microsoft in the business computing space? With Microsoft, I'm also aware of a great amount of anti-competitive behavior, and though I haven't seen that from Cloudflare personally and haven't heard accusations of it, I also haven't paid attention. When I learned econ 101 in high school there was a concept of a "natural monopoly" like an electricity utility, a concept that was probably mostly post-hoc rationalization of the regulatory structures that were chosen a century ago, but it at least was a coherent narrative. I can't see any coherent narrative about Cloudflare's services being a natural monopoly. So I'm left wondering if they are just way better at what they do than anybody else, and perhaps the space isn't big enough to drive a competitor to enter it? I hope somebody on HN has a much better explanation of this than I do.
- Groxx 3mo agoI suspect a big part of it is that CF is running other businesses on the side, and offering basic features at a loss - they've artificially depressed the price of the service so it's hard to compete with them on only that service. Everyone using the free service likes that, of course, but honestly I wish we'd make it illegal to do. It's heavily used as a way to steal small markets simply by being successful in a different large one.
- autoexec 3mo ago> Everyone using the free service likes that, of course, but honestly I wish we'd make it illegal to do. I can see the benefit, but if you made free services illegal companies like google would just offer gmail for a penny. You'd could go farther and say that no one should be allowed to provide a good or service for less than it costs them to provide it. That still has problems though. For example, Netflix sends servers to ISPs to set up on their network so that segments of that ISP's customers are pulling data from one of those boxes distributing the load. ISPs are happy to do it because it means fewer customers call them to complain about slow speeds/buffering issues with netflix. If netflix wanted to start selling CDN services to others, having all those boxes at every major ISP in the nation means the cost to deliver that service will be much lower for netflix than it would for some new start up. You can't really make it illegal to offer a service at a price lower than it would cost the poorest and least efficient/capable would-be competitor though. We'd also risk losing a lot. Everyone would be forced to pay youtube some amount proportionate to what it costs for youtube to exist. There are also extremely expensive to run services like the internet archive which would be bad to price people out of
- layer8 3mo agoRegulation could conceivably disallow a single company to control such a significant portion of internet traffic. The parent can be interpreted as lamenting the absence of such regulation.
- autoexec 3mo agoIt's certainly a huge risk when one company's outage can take down so much of internet. Decentralization and the ability to route around damage was a core feature of the internet. The more we depend on the internet, the less acceptable that loss becomes.
- stickfigure 3mo agoThe only thing more annoying than people chanting "regulation is bad" is people chanting "regulation is good". What regulation? Be specific. CloudFlare provides significant utility to me. I chose to use them. Explain why you think someone else needs to butt into this relationship.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- layer8 3mo agoI wasn't advocating regulation. I was arguing against the claim that "nobody allowed anything". The absence of regulation is allowing things.
- dwedge 3mo ago> CF serves a customers need CF serves something it convinced customers they need. Static blogs hiding behind bot protection (in some cases blocking legit users from GrapheneOS because it's difficult to fingerprint them) because someone convinced them they'll be DDoSed by bots otherwise is a loss to the Internet. A lot of self-hosters running CF tunnels because they don't know better also contributes. > It's more healthy to start the conversation of _why_ CF services are valuable. Begging the question. It's what TFA is about - telling people they need CF.
- NetOpWibby 3mo agoA lot of self-hosters running CF tunnels because they don't know better also contributes. If you know better, you should contribute.
- majke 3mo ago> A lot of self-hosters running CF tunnels because they don't know better also contributes. Are you saying CF documentation is better than Computer Science / Networking education resources? Why don't people know better? I thought the tunnels are mostly used to bypass NAT's. > Static blogs hiding behind bot protection I'm not sure what is the proportion of the static vs dynamic sites, but I would argue that for wordpress CF is adding real value.
- dwedge 3mo ago> I thought the tunnels are mostly used to bypass NAT's. While not free, you can do with with TCP HAProxy streams on a cheap VPS. A lot of people using them to bypass NAT don't realise that Cloudflare decrypt the traffic on the way - that's what I meant about them not knowing better.
- rs_rs_rs_rs_rs 3mo ago[flagged]
- dwedge 3mo agoIt's not about being incompetent. Quite often in selfhosted subreddits and forums you will see people surprised that Cloudflare can see their traffic in plaintext. Of course, they probably don't, but the fact that they can and that their policies now influence XX% of internet traffic is bad for the open internet.
- tmpz22 3mo agoThe fent dealer just serves the customers needs too
- autoexec 3mo agocloudflare (and CDNs more generally) certainly started out as an own goal. Warnings were ignored and most people did the easy thing instead of the right thing.