Comment by smt88
4 years ago
> A 3rd party corporation is deliberately deciding which browsers are legitimate and which are not. They prevent users of these browsers from accessing millions of websites with a flip of a switch. There's no transparency and no accountability to their actions.
Yes. Private monopolies/oligopolies are bad. They're literally a threat to civilization. We already realized that monarchies are bad because they centralize (judicial) power into unelected, opaque bodies controlled by a single person, and now we've done the same through the private sector.
This is not something to solve by begging Cloudflare to be reasonable. You need to lobby to break up oligopolies.
Individuals don’t really have lobbying power. It’d be great if we could solve problems like this comprehensively with legislation, but in the meantime shaming a company into doing the right thing is perhaps all that a small but vocal group of people really can do right now.
Perfect is the enemy of the good, especially in this case.
How can you shame Cloudflare in this case? This is a very niche issue that non-technical people won't even care about. I don't even think people should be using Waterfox or Pale Moon -- it's the enormous power that Cloudflare holds that bothers me. And it's in their best interest (i.e. the interests of their owners) to do things like this.
"Corporations are too powerful" is a much more popular position than "Cloudflare shouldn't block certain browser," which means that adding your voice -- by donating, voting selectively, and/or calling officials -- is a better bet than trying to get people to care about this.
> How can you shame Cloudflare in this case? This is a very niche issue that non-technical people won't even care about
shame doesn't have to be seen by everyone to work – just by those they rely on. In this case, technical people who are responsible for choosing to adopt cloudflare in companies come to regard it badly, and discourage its use in the future or switch to competitors. Cloudflare is now motivated to change.
Get some people together and build something for people that don't want to use cloudfare for their hosting.
I don't want any individual to have strong lobbying power.
+1 for more competition
You want us to ask a government, an absolute monopoly sustain by force to break up Cloudflare in the name of opposing monopolies/oligopolies? Despite the fact that Cloudflare only has power to the extent individual website owners voluntarily choose to use them? That doesn't make any sense.