Comment by HeatrayEnjoyer
9 months ago
Seconding that anything this big should be nationalized. That said, the internet still worked before cloudflare. The threat of a banned troll DDoSing your forum has been a risk for 30 years, yet the flourishing golden age of forums was before anyone had heard of cloudflare.
Add in their centralized panopticon of mass decrypted traffic and it becomes undeniable CF is an enormous net negative to the internet and society at large.
> The threat of a banned troll DDoSing your forum has been a risk for 30 years, yet the flourishing golden age of forums was before anyone had heard of cloudflare.
Private forums in my experience stopped being a thing around 2010-2015-ish. The first deathknell was metasploit which made 0wning a target so much more easy than it was before, the second and final blow were "ddos for hire" services, running on cryptocurrencies that promised (and delivered) true anonymity, and using mass hacked consumer devices as a botnet that was much harder to defeat against than an STRO in some datacenter where you (or your DC) could just block the IP address.
They could argue that they are on the side of the "good guys" (intelligence services and the police), especially if you consider their historical ties of collaborating with the 3-letters agencies like the FBI (c.f. how all started with Project Honey Pot).