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Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think this would fly for a number of reasons, but CloudFlare isn’t exactly a world leader or even a household name. They’re a newcomer in this space and for once they’re actually open with their community (us). If CloudFlare is the villain, then are CenturyLink & Comcast the heroes? By my estimation, we’re more likely to see any kind of doomsday scenario like that executed by cable companies and telcos — which already have a natural monopoly in most localities. I don’t see CloudFlare as having anywhere close to that reach.

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No one is the villain here, it's not that simple.

These are companies that respond to market pressures. Routing around the network operators (both figuratively and literally) makes a lot of sense for large cloud providers. Especially so if there are no network neutrality rules in place to enforce free access to consumers (as opposed to consumer ISPs demanding payment for pushing content to their subscribers).

Also, the content from Google, Facebook and a couple other cloud providers is what consumers actually want. I've seen internal numbers from a European mobile provider that show that >80% of consumer traffic is to/from either Facebook or Youtube. So are the consumers villains?

There is a big difference between traffic numbers of youtube and surfing the net. I may have a documentary open in the background while I read dozens of other websites.

Is it still 80% if you filter out passive (streaming) and non-human (heartbeats, tracking, analytics) traffic?

If you measured that by doing a count() and group by on the domains of a traffic log, it would be easy to draw a conclusion that doesn't meaningfully reflect real user activity.

> Also, the content from Google, Facebook and a couple other cloud providers is what consumers actually want.

What content from Google and Facebook? If you are referring to YouTube and Instagram - that's one part of the total internet content consumed. Hard to totally ignore the news sites, blogs and streaming services.

The vast majority of which are hosted in the public cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) or behind content delivery networks like Cloudflare or Akamai.

The centralization of the internet and death of the “end to end” ethos is very real unfortunately.

CloudFlare is definitely large enough to raise concerns about centralization of the Internet. You don't have to be a household name for that (e.g. Akamai isn't either). Their site says that their infrastructure "powers nearly 10% of all Internet requests".

They aren't a villain, they're an illustration of market forces currently favoring centralization. Like CenturyLink and Comcast, for that matter.

I don't think CloudFlare is a newcomer. They're big in the CDN market.

"big in the CDN market" is very different to "has enough pull to significantly centralize the internet like Google or Amazon".

CDNs are literally the other thing (aside from Public Cloud providers) that are centralizing the internet.

You statement is the exact opposite of reality.

That’s a very harsh dismissal and I don’t think it holds up well because it ignores the difficulty of switching. You can switch CDNs quickly, without needing any user actions, whereas it’s considerably more work to switch cloud providers and even harder to get users to switch their usage.

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