The internet is worse for me with Cloudflare. I'm using a cellphone router for my internet. My guess is I don't get a dedicated IP and probably behind a NAT with other users. 85% of my request needs me to solve a cloudflare captcha. on bad days I have to do this easily 100+ times.
It is not Cloudflare's fault. It means the website operators were so fed up with bots and bad actors that they just applied a carpet ban and called it a day.
Thanks to Cloudflare I was able to reduce my website load threefold and downscale my VMs and my monthly cloud bill, and seeing how 50k daily requests were shown CAPTCHA and not even tried to solve it makes me terrified of running anything without Cloudflare.
Don't blame site owners and service that is trying to help them. Blame the fact that 90% of today's Internet traffic is bots
If I click on a search result and it shows me a CloudFlare CAPTCHA I leave. Immediately and permanently. I get what you are saying but also you will not get a dime from me if I have to waste my time solving a CAPTCHA prompt that half the time is so broken it just gets stuck in a loop.
I guess whatever revenue you lose you make up for in a lower hosting bill. I just go to your competitor that doesn’t have the horrible UX. Usually those websites also tend to have much more optimized web pages too so it is an all around better experience.
Of course it's cloudflare's fault. They monetized and scaled a service that blocks humans from interacting with websites.
They're also essentially a deanonymization reverse proxy that can track everyone's browsing history and decide whether you get to see websites based on social credit.
That I'm not so sure about. If they get too block-happy they'll lose customers.
But I don't think they care if they block firefox users, or people who delete cookies, or VPN users, or Tor users, or people who resist fingerprinting, or people who block ads, etc.
It's cloudlare's fault that it's so common to have very overzealous blocking. Site owners need access to bot protection but that doesn't mean highly flawed protection gets to be blameless.
> It means the website operators were so fed up with bots and bad actors that they just applied a carpet ban and called it a day.
Many of my websites get 98% of their traffic from bots and bad actors, but it doesn’t really matter because the extra load of all these fake requests is absolutely negligible. I have a hard time understanding how someone would be bothered by an extra 50k requests a day. That’s less than a request per second. Most of the sites on even the weakest VM’s can easily do 10r/s these days.
But what's the counterfactual? People use cloudflare because they want protection from ddos attacks and bots. If cloudflare didn't exist there would probably be similar measures.
Businesses want to protect the continuity of their business operations, and to that end they buy such protection as a service, from a business that managed to MitM half the Internet in order to provide such service.
Point being, it's a commercial subverting the Internet from inside, reshaping it to better serve the interests of commerce. It is indeed protection, but it's accomplished by reducing variance. 99% of legitimate commerce on the Internet follows the same patterns, use a small subset of possibilities offered by the technology - so why not just block the remaining 1% that doesn't fit and call it a day? It will stop most of the threats to running businesses on the Internet. The 1% of legitimate commerce that doesn't fit the pattern? It's not being ignored per se, just pressured to adapt and conform to the majority.
What is being ignored is that the Internet is not just a place of commerce, and non-commercial use cases, ideas such as empowering people to better their lives, are gradually becoming impossible, as fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them.
Some of us still remember the Internet being more than just a virtual mall, and are unhappy about it gradually becoming one. And it's not like CloudFlare, et al. are hostile to non-commercial interests as a matter of principle - it's just out of scope for them.
I actually think that Cloudflare has made publishing on the internet _more_ accessible for many individuals. I’ve helped a few people get personal websites running on Cloudflare pages and run my own there—it’s free and extremely easy. They could obviously pull the plug at any point, but with static sites it’s easy to avoid lock-in. If it weren’t for Cloudflare and other services that give free, easy hosting, I suspect there would be even fewer of the non-commercial small-internet sites that you value.
There have been places that host personal and hobby websites for free for at least the last 30 years. Some older ones have left, and newer ones keep coming along. Cloudflare didn't make this any more accessible.
Your first paragraph summarize why businesses want to use Cloudflare and how it helps them maintain their business.
Your second paragraph talks about other (non-commercial) sites. I think I'm missing the link here. Why would the admins of such sites resort to Cloudflare if 'fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them' by making that choice? They could very well choose to implement their own or no measures at all.
I think the issue is that the general threat level has massively increased compared to the past - not in terms of sophistication but frequency/scale. But that's a consequence of widespread adoption, nothing Cloudflare in particular is responsible for.
> Why would the admins of such sites resort to Cloudflare if 'fundamental Internet infrastructure becomes inhospitable for them' by making that choice? They could very well choose to implement their own or no measures at all.
Marketing and free tiers.
But my point is that Cloudflare is addressing threats that predominantly affect businesses, and does so well, but the way it does is effectively changing the whole Internet to be more hospitable for commerce, and less hospitable for any other kind of use.
