Unfortunately due to AI scrapers and botnet spammers, bot filter mechanisms are needed now more than ever to evade DDoS, scalper bots and scams.

It doesn't have to be cloudflare, though they are the biggest and the performance is renown. Deflect - deflect.ca is a Canadian alternative solution I've seen implemented on Cory Doctorow's blogsite pluralistic.net

Completely understand the sentiment! It's very annoying to get these.

As a website operator, I don't have a lot of defenses to bots crawling my site. As it stands, around 60% of my site traffic would be bots. I have to pay for data for this, as it's just a hobby.

You can bet damn well I'm using cloud flare's free tools to keep this unwanted traffic down, even if it annoys a few of my dozen users.

That sucks as a user but it's necessary for the retailers because of fraud bots. If you're getting loads of these prompts then it's possible you have some malware running somewhere on your network which is causing more suspicion for your IP address.

The bottom line up front: its not a Cloudflare issue or a Canadian online retailer issue, it's legitimately an issue caused by something on your side.

Cloudflare has the best AI, malware, DDoS, and botnet protection i have ever seen from any commercial provider in my 30 years of being in tech.

The fact that it's blocking your IP means you have a concerning issue with your network. If you are paying for a ISP that uses mobile networks to give you internet, you are likely being flagged because someone else is on your CGNAT doing fucky things and you need to switch to another ISP.

Or your own network in your house is compromised and you are genuinely part of a botnet that Cloudflare sees as a threat and blocked you.

Unfortunately, I can almost guarantee not a single Canadian retailer will see this post.

For me it behaves like that if I have adblockers and noscript running. It gets stuck in a loop