Comment by raxi

5 years ago

Cloudflare (Matthew Prince personally, here on Hacker News few months ago) said that they do reverse that their global stance for Netflix and some other megacorps.

So this is a super-premium feature unavailable to small players.

CloudFlare just changed how DNS behaved and charge corps to make it work as it worked before CloudFlare entered the stage.

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raxi

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akerl_  5 years ago

Do you have a citation for that? Sourcing from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702 , they don’t reverse their global stance for large providers. Their stance is ~”Including client IP via EDNS violates our goal of maximizing user data privacy”, and what they’re working on with other large-scale providers is a way to improve geo-resolution without weakening user privacy.

  • raxi  5 years ago

    Exactly on your link, just ctrl-F for "Netflix":

    "We are working with the small number of networks with a higher network/ISP density than Cloudflare (e.g., Netflix, Facebook, Google/YouTube) to come up with an EDNS IP Subnet alternative that gets them the information they need for geolocation".

    Well, I might be inaccurate in saying "exactly the same protocol as before", but it is clear that what was available to every webmaster via EDNS, now available only to members of a closed club, via good old EDNS or a proprietary alternative. The latter is more likely, not because of privacy-caring, but because they could now charge it as license fee for using private protocol.

    • akerl_  5 years ago

      EDNS is an optional field. Client subnet is an optional part of that optional field. It’s relatively new compared to DNS as a whole, and most “webmasters” don’t make active use of it.

      The quote you pulled is about Cloudflare’s efforts to build a better standard. They’re talking to the people with the expertise and interest to build that standard. You’ve inferred “proprietary” and “closed club”, and a ton of motive besides, and you’ve copy-pasted that speculation as if it were fact into multiple comment trees.

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    • judge2020  5 years ago

      I think they mean they're working on an alternative standard, not anywhere near "we give you an API to match DNS requests to origin city". These talks might have been as simple as "we'll give you [and everyone] geoip information for the datacenters we request from based on IP, and you can load balance off that".

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