Comment by lapcat
9 months ago
> As we think about our role at Cloudflare in this developing market, it's not about protecting the status quo but instead helping catalyze a better business model for the future of Internet content creation. That means creating a level playing field. Ideally there should be lots of AI companies, large and small, and lots of content creators, large and small.
Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare.
The "level playing field" rhetoric reminds me so much of Apple talking about the App Store. This new internet business model is just the App Store, substituting websites for apps and Cloudflare for Apple. The system only works with some middleman between the AI companies and the content creators.
I see what you mean, and I am divided on the issue. On one hand, I don't think it's fair to have AI companies to freely scrape the world without fairly compensating content producers. On the other hand, adding more gatekeepers to the web ends up killing it.
This feels like a lose-lose situation.
Cloudflare is most active in pushing standards, and highlighting the issue of bots scraping web pages for free. That said, the other major CDNs (e.g. Akamai, Fastly) also have Bot Management functionality, so hopefully this is not a gatekeeping scenario, more of a standards-building scenario.
In some positive news today, Cloudflare is sponsoring the Ladybird browser effort:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332860
That's not nothing.
Its a token gesture. Ladybird is not a serious disruption.
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Likely related on getting influece in order to enforce the gatekeeping standards, unfortunately.
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That feels like a bog basic false choice fallacy.
> That feels like a bog basic false choice fallacy.
Only if you somehow believe you have a choice, or even a say.
That is a lot of hands... Are you AI generated? lol =3
Two _is_ more than the average, but not by that much...
> On the other hand, adding more gatekeepers to the web ends up killing it.
LOL, what?
> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare.
Nothing in their idea challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to compete in constructing a reverse proxy service with LLM-centric content controls similar to cloudflare, whether that’s AWS WAF or akamai or some new startup.
Nothing in Google's search monopoly challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to complete...
From the stats I've seen, Cloudflare has an 80% market share for reverse proxy services. 20% of all websites use Cloudflare, 50% of the most popular websites globally. That's a dangerous amount of concentration, and it's the only reason Cloudflare can propose this new business model for the internet and be taken seriously.
Google’s monopoly is dangerous because they linked success in search to dominance in other areas, and especially the most popular web browser.
I wouldn’t recommend trusting any large company but so far Cloudflare doesn’t appear to be pulling a Google because they sell directly rather than to third parties. Google never charged for search so they ended up doing a reverse acquisition into DoubleClick to get advertisers to pay for the searches we do. Cloudflare does have a free tier but their paid services are decidedly not free and since they have serious competition in the CDN business, zero-trust, etc. they have the direct incentive not to screw their customers which Google lacked. I’d get worried if that ever changes.
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> Nothing in Google's search monopoly challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to compete...
But it's true? It's still true today. The only worrying part of the story is that google also makes browser and OS, which doesn't apply to Cloudflare.
The above comparison to App Store is even weirder / more ridiculous. App devs publish on App Store because App Store is pre-installed on every iPhone already, so it maximizes the number of users they can reach. Websites use Cloudflare to protect themselves, at the cost of reducing the number of users they can reach. The two situations are so different that "false equivalence" is an understatement.
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So what? I should hate them for that? Cloudflare is really good at what it does. Nobody has to use cloudflare, but people who know what they’re doing choose cloudflare because the service they provide is worth the minuscule price they charge and it solves the massive abuse and performance problems that otherwise plague the internet.
Bing/msn.com failed to displace Google because Google was simply better, not because Google played dirty.
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It could be interesting to build a small startup that identifies hate speech on Twitter, Threads, Blue Sky, and other platforms.
I envision a UI that displays the message and, in a sidebar, lists what aspects of the message classify it as hate speech. Then, like a spam filter, you could decide to block the message.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1084806... https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01577 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03346
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But everything in their idea challenges the idea of the Internet as a public-ish good.
> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare.
I don't get it. Can you point out where Cloudflare gains the power to prevent Google or any other company from doing the same?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
It's not impossible. But it's hard.
How would that work short of them buying most of the fiber in the world? A natural monopoly is a big problem for ISPs but they don’t do last-mile and they don’t appear to be anywhere close to being able to manipulate thr transit market.
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Also weird for their shining example to be Reddit. Where the actual creators there would not get a dime, presumably
Also weird that they think reddit is something other than ragebait. I avoid reddit as much as I can, because everytime I go there the reddit feed is full of some of the worst ragebait on the internet.
I think that's true of any algorithmic feed. The individual niche communities are still pretty good I find. YMMV of course
> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare.
Cloudflare is already a monopoly though. From what I can tell, what they are saying here, besides proclaiming their continued existence, is that they and AI companies and content creators need the internet to exist.
And what they are building is on top of the 402 response, which anyone can use? So you could use that without using any CDN at all, without too much development cost?
They are all platforms: news companies, publishing houses, ISPs, recording labels, YouTube, Google, Meta, TikTok, Windows, App Store, Play Store, Amazon.. and as platforms they squeeze both the layer above and the one below, their customers and their providers.
You know what that looks like? rent. It looks like home owners setting rent as high as the market can bear, until it becomes almost no advantage at all to participate.
It sure looks like Cloudflare wants to be the platform for AI royalty collections. But creators, customers, sellers - they are all hostage to the platforms they can't avoid. That is where the money sink is.
How is Cloudflare a monopoly as opposed to just being popular? The CDN, security, edge compute, etc. markets all have multiple popular competitors.
Sorry, not exactly monopoly. Probably too big to fail, from what I gather, though. I don't know enough to know whether there is anyone else that could realistically compete with their scale.
My point was simply that their size is unrelated to this proposition, outside the fact they are big enough to be taken seriously.
Is there currently a more open alternative to Cloudflare? I would assume that people don't really use it until they have significant traffic from all different parts of the world?
In which case for the self-host people we can just pick a decent CDN?
I've done a few tests with CF hosted webapps... overall it's pretty good experience, and for my usage has been free, despite opting into a paid account level, I haven't exceeded the free usage.
For mostly-static or static-site content it's pretty nice all around. I've not gotten into the SQLite service so much though, which I might and seems interesting.. there's also Turso to consider as an alternative option... Not to mention Deno, Fastly and other similar options.
Kind of hoping to see something similar start to gain traction to support wasm backend systems similarly.
This is beyond their DDoS/Proxy protection, but worth considering as part of what they offer. There's a lot there to like.
an American company controlling the internet
> The "level playing field" rhetoric reminds me so much of Apple talking about the App Store.
To be fair to apple, many billion dollar businesses have been built for and distributed by the app store. Think about all people employed to work on mobile apps, all those people going to local taco truck for lunch owned by an immigrant, that immigrant buying a nice christmas present for their kid, etc.
> To be fair to apple, many billion dollar businesses have been built for and distributed by the app store.
This sentence is missing something essential:
Many billion dollar businesses have been built for iPhone and distributed by the app store.
iPhone is the platform, whereas App Store is merely the exclusive method of software distribution as dictated by Apple. Contrast with the Apple Mac, where the App Store is not the exclusive method of software distribution.
And of all companies Cloudflare. People, research their business practices...