Imagine all the people in countries deemed less desirable by Cloudflare that go through this all the time. Cloudflare, whether it's their stated goal or not, is re-stratifying and re-centralizing the Internet because of their desire to be a monopoly, and we'll all suffer as a result.
1) refuse to take responsibility for content they host by claiming they don't host
2) discriminate against huge parts of the Internet with no publicly known rules, nor methods to change that discrimination
3) make the abuse reporting process intentionally difficult and time-consuming
4) want to aggregate all the DNS data they can by making a deal with Firefox to turn on DNS-over-https by default without asking or even informing end users
5) want to re-centralize the Internet, in part so they can mix bad actors with good, in ways that make blocking next to impossible
How many of them do the discrimination we're all writing about here?
1) refuse to take responsibility for content they host by claiming they don't host
>CDNs don't host content, they proxy it
2) discriminate against huge parts of the Internet with no publicly known rules, nor methods to change that discrimination
>Not large parts of the internet, scammy and attacky parts of the internet. If the rules were public they wouldn't be effective.
3) make the abuse reporting process intentionally difficult and time-consuming
>simply untrue, every abuse report i have filed has had an answer back within 24hrs
4) want to aggregate all the DNS data they can by making a deal with Firefox to turn on DNS-over-https by default without asking or even informing end users
>this is a good thing as they are audited as having not keeping logs of dns queries
5) want to re-centralize the Internet, in part so they can mix bad actors with good, in ways that make blocking next to impossible
>again every cdn centralizes the internet, and many sites need this protection
Wow. You've really drank the Flavor Aid. You didn't even offer any new, actually useful information.
Hosting is providing services without which a presence on the Internet won't work. Hosting was around before the web, so how is it that you think you can magically come along and declare, "this is now the definition of hosting"? Only through bullshit.
If by "scammy and attacky parts of the internet" you mean whole countries, good for you for being an elitist.
I'm happy that you've "had an answer back within 24 hours", but that doesn't address the fact that it's time consuming and arduous. Notice that you didn't respond to that part at all. Their reporting site doesn't have an option for spam (because they don't care), the Javascript allows more text to be entered than the form will accept (so you have to know to go and delete some), and it doesn't allow nearly enough in the first place. For someone who wants to forward abuse to abuse@cloudflare, it's shitty and it's a way to discourage abuse reporting.
So tell me about how Google, Facebook and Amazon have never lied about what they're doing with data. Then go ahead and explain to me how it is that we're just supposed to trust Cloudflare. Audited by whom? When? How is there conclusive, testable proof that the data isn't analyzed or siphoned off somewhere else? Are you ignoring the fact that this is in part an attempt to become a monopoly, and in part an attempt to make it so that network-level filtering next to impossible? You didn't reply to any of this, which makes you seem all the more like a paid shill than someone who actually cares about an exchange of ideas.
But then you say, "every cdn centralizes the internet", which means you're either willfully ignoring the points brought up here, or you're really, really clueless and don't know how to respond to point brought up, so you talk about other things instead.
We don't need any more paid shills. If you really don't understand the points brought up about how Cloudflare is working tirelessly to become a monopoly in ways that are measurably different from regular CDNs, then ASK. If you don't understand how we (the Internet collectively) are going to assume that Cloudflare cares more about making money than about doing the right thing, then please look at all the privacy nightmares we've learned about Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, et cetera.
If you're just here to tell us how much you love Cloudflare, that's fine, too, but you don't do that by just randomly disputing points with irrelevant responses.
tbh I think one of the very few positives of having so many sites going through a few CDNs is that you can make it impossible to block a protocol or site without significant collateral damage, which can be a good thing, things like Tor's meek bridge rely on that.
