Comment by YmiYugy

It's worth considering the counter factual. Let's say there would be a few dozen semi popular DDoS services. Would that be better? Some assumptions: The services would be slightly less effective and also have worse downtimes. You could argue that Cloudflare is coasting on a monopoly and that competition would drive them to improve, but I'm pretty confident that DDoS protection it one of those things were having a large network to absorb attacks and a large team to monitor them if very valuable. I submit as evidence that Cloudflare has been doing well despite the 3 big cloud providers offering DDoS protection.

So what would be the result of a highly decentralized but slightly worse and less reliable DDoS protection? I'd argue that for a lot of things this wouldn't be an improvement. Cloudflare being so dominant means lot's of things go down simultaneously. But that only matters for fungible services, e.g. if a schools education portal goes down, it doesn't matter if all the other education portals are also down. There are cases where it matters like the tyre pumps. I'd argue that these devices have no reason to be reliant on an online connection to begin with. I think cloud services as a whole have massively improved the reliability of internet services. In almost all cases reducing the overall amount of outages is a higher priority than preventing outage correlations.