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Supporting the future of the open web: Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy (blog.cloudflare.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 19 points 1 year ago* (7 children)

Why does CloudFlare not want an open web? I don't know why they care. Can someone please explain? Is it because they sometimes block VPNs?

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  • [–] 38 points 1 year ago

    They do.

    The basis for the FUD is that Cloudflare controls a lot of the web since they're used as a CDN, DDOS mitigation, domain registration, etc. However, what the FUD fails to mention is they don't provide most of the infrastructure for the web, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure totally dwarf their footprint. DDOS protection and whatnot may be provided largely by Cloudflare, but not the rest of the web stack.

    Cloudflare very much doesn't want one or two companies to dominate the web because that'll kill their business model. The more diversity there is on the web, the more attractive their services are, because people are willing to pay for things to just work.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

    I can explain. Cloudflare does not block VPNs, some website owners choose to block VPNs using Cloudflare services.

    Cloudflare itself is very open to VPNs, like you can use their free services to proxy your VPN over their network bypassing country providers blocking. You'll have to pay a lot for such service in Amazon or Azure.

    So their business model is that poor people can receive cool services for free providing marketing for their business clients to pay for even better services. And they do provide cool services for free and even better services for reasonable payments.

    Closed web means Google, Amazon and Azure own their business and the web. They don't want that neither in business sense nor in moral sense.

    Edit. I'd like to emphasise that Cloudflare is the only CDN that provides their basic services for free to common people, making the web available to common people, making the web more free.

    I've seen a couple of threads here where people shit on Cloudflare(including this one). They are stupid, don't know how the web works and are out of their minds.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Cloudflare wants the web to be made of web pages. But they also have an interest in the web being at least slightly dangerous (so there's an incentive to buy their protection services), and at least somewhat hard to make work well when served from a potato (so there's an incentive to use their CDN to shave off those milliseconds of latency). And, as a large provider of excellent and often free services, they end up as an administrative single point of failure and thus a potential point of control. It's a lot easier to wiretap one Cloudflare DoH resolver than thousands of ISP routers across dozens of ISPs, for example.

    None of this is because Cloudflare is somehow Bad People; they're powerful and thus dangerous, but not, as far as I can tell, evil. The worst thing about them seems to be that they'd prefer to stay out of content moderation completely rather than try to find and boot all the Nazis, which looks like it might be an incorrect position that is possible to support with arguments.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    they'd prefer to stay out of content moderation completely rather than try to find and boot all the Nazis

    With how loose this word(and others) is used nowadays by people from Israel, USA, Russia, Africa and maybe other countries I prefer Cloudflare to stay that way.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Idk, but a lot of Lemmy instances also don’t play nice with VPNs. Some of them are using Cloudflare, but idk if all the ones blocking VPNs are the ones using Cloudflare. But bot traffic is a big problem, and Cloudflare poses a solution to that. It’s not the ony solution, but it is a pretty good one.

    You can’t really have a free social media network and not have it block VPNs. At least not with large public instances.

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