Cloudflare's business model is intrinsically threatened by the existence of a global, distributed, and (basically) commons-supported CDN, because that would make their point-served, centralized, relatively expensive CDN obsolete.
No, not really. IPFS is a storage platform. Cloudflare is fundamentally a compute platform (servers in hundreds of cities to which you can deploy arbitrary code and trust that it is executed faithfully). These two things are complementary, not competitive, which is why we decided it would be interesting to integrate with IPFS.
I understand that Cloudflare aspires to be primarily a compute platform. I think it’s a cool goal, and you have the technical chops to build it. But isn’t it fair to say today that Cloudflare is primarily a networking platform? We customers use you, overwhelmingly, to make our sites load faster, and pay less in the process. Not far behind comes anti-ddos protection - also a networking-centric feature. Everything else is aspirational.
I am aware of where you want to go - and the workers feature you’re working on, for example, is extremely cool. But realize that there is a huge gap between where you want to be as a business and a brand, and where you actually are.
IPFS may not compete with what you want to be - but it does compete with what you are. That’s because IPFS is not a storage platform, it’s a content distribution platform. And Cloudflare is in the content distribution business.
IPFS is not a storage platform - or if so, it's a temporary, short-term storage platform whose purpose it is to cache and deliver content - especially highly-requested content - to users. It can't be a long-term storage platform because there's no way to ensure that other people will store your content long-term!
I think Cloudflare could easily co-exist, selling premium IPFS hosting for companies who want highly available and performant content. Not to mention they do much more than static CDN.
You're implying that there's some ulterior-motive Embrace, Extend, Extinguish plan underlying this? Is there anything, however, in what they announced they will do that will have a negative effect, though?
