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this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I don't see the need to vilify Cloudflare. So far, they have shown nothing but respect towards net neutrality, fighting against bad internet practices (like Google), and even standing up to ISPs and governments to protect their users, whether they're pirates or not.
They have been around long enough (10+ years) to let you judge them and their services through their actions, not rumours.
They are a good company, but that's not the problem. The problem is the internet is increasingly got centralized behind them, to the point of blocking their IP addresses (or when they have an outage) broke a significant chunk of the internet. Also, once they control a significant chunk of internet, what's stopping them from turning shitty like google (which famously started with a "don't be evil" motto)? At that point it's probably too late to decentralize the internet again.
Centralization is an issue, but it's not Cloudflare to blame, it's the ISPs and governing bodies. Consider this: who's the one who initiated the initial block in the first place?
Centralization is likely the unintended end result of the internet. Consider a mesh network where all the links have even throughput. Now suddenly one node has some content that goes viral. Everyone wants to access that data. Suddenly that node needs to support a link that’s much wider because everyone’s requests accumulate there.
Someone goes and upgrades that link. Well now they can serve many more other nodes so they start advertising to put others' viral information on the node with larger link.