Finally an IPO I want to buy into. Technical fundamentals matter.
Edit: I mean that in the software/service way, not the economical way, in case there was any confusion.
Edit: I mean that in the software/service way, not the economical way, in case there was any confusion.
Centralization of the entire internet behind a single entity is a _bad_ thing for people who care about technical fundamentals.
It should not be up to Matthew Prince to decide who to block. He has demonstrated his inability to function as censor in a very visible (and frankly embarassing) way.
How? There have been exactly two cases of "censorship", and that is the Daily Stormer and 8chan. One is an utterly vile peddler of antisemitism (literally named after a Nazi paper) and conspiracy theory, and one was linked to at least three terroristic attacks. If it were not white supremacists but Islamists, it would be closed down in an instant and no one would bat an eye.
If anything, Cloudflare seriously lacks (like Facebook and Twitter) policing their customer base.
This is ironic since Cloudflare has famously been under fire because Prince specifically decided against removing ISIS websites from Cloudflare and vehemently defended his decision that Cloudflare should not be censoring anyone.
Prince himself even agrees with the parent comment, and he goes into pretty good detail in his blog post here [1] about why companies like Cloudflare should not be able to make the decision to remove websites, and that it should be left up to governments. I guess he got overruled on that stance when it came to 8chan, though.
1: https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
I can imagine the next Edward Snowden will reveal the intelligence community's direct line into the traffic running over Cloudflare's infrastructure. Cloudflare is providing DNS and HTTPS services on a massive scale which means they can essentially MiTM any of their customers on behalf of the government.
If you are discussing whats best for society and how these businesses impact those things, then this could be alarming news.
I appreciate how they pushed HTTPs widely. But now that's Let's encrypt exists there's no excuse.
Ill also never forgive them for making Tor completely unusable for accessing any normal website. It's almost impossible to pass the security checks and if you do another one is coming once you switch IP. I understand Tor is a niche product but it's an important one for activists and other persecuted people. And it will only continue to grow in importance as the dictators all learn how to do NSA style mass surveillance.
The DDOS stuff if the harder problem to solve and I don't know enough about it to judge the competition's ability to offer it safely and privacy friendly way.
The Tor stuff feels way over blown to me. I worked at CF while it was a problem, and was an avid Tor user at the time. It was a terrible user experience, but it wasn't completely Cloudflare's fault. They didn't target Tor users, Tor exit nodes have terrible IP rep which is an industry standard for risk rating IPs. ReCaptcha had some functional issues that could not be solved by Cloudflare. And lastly, site owners did next to nothing to support their Tor visitors even once dedicated options were available via the IP Firewall. This seems like hyperbole, especially as JGC was avid about getting this resolved, and was very public with the discourse. Companies don't do things perfect all the time, and it seems extreme to hold CF purely responsible and hold onto that anger for something that's long been resolved.
In the end, everything in this S-1 is promising for people interested in tech businesses, which is what many people are praising. They already generate a profit, their operation costs are reasonable, etc.
They don't turn a profit, and their operating costs are growing sharply. From the S-1:
> As we continue to invest in our business, we have incurred net losses of $17.3 million, $10.7 million, and $87.2 million for 2016, 2017, and 2018, respectively.
Their business model of taking over and centralizing whole sections of internet will continually cause a backlash. They only have a percentage of all traffic today and it continues to increase. And apparently so does their willingness to not be a neutral service provider as we saw with 8chan, which is in stark contrast to their policy towards the LulzSec hackers and plenty of other "bad guys".
I'm sure Cloudflare will continue to be a good business in the short-term, but that should never be the relevant metric for any business. But it will become more and more obvious to everyone the bigger they get.
Is the privacy pass extension an invalid fix for the problem?
They do the opposite. They enable small website owners to survive on the internet without having to use vertically integrated services like cloud offerings.
Current circumstances are a sad and unfortunate state of the internet.
A client deployment of an app, that the client had behind cloudflare was making 80ms API requests take 8 seconds. It's not always great.
I'm not saying that there aren't alternatives, and that people have to use Cloudflare... but there really isn't much in the way of an alternative at even a similar level of support and price on the low/introduction side of things. The issue regarding recaptcha can be REALLY annoying, especially on a non-google browser.
As for the millions of websites going offline. Surely, Cloudflare has tons of customers. It's an internet scale company. If they act sloppy and have tons of downtime a competitor might take over. If it's hard to architect a DDoS protection service in a robust way then that's just the world we live in. But I think you should appreciate that Cloudflare sells DDoS protection (their core product atm) without selling you a big package like http serving or root servers.
I'm not saying that it's happening, or even that it is the biggest concern for most. But it should be a bit of a concern to some, and one may want to think about if they really want to use them in this context. It's a matter of knowing and evaluating all of the risks involved.
Does it really matter for a static blog that only publishes a few articles a week? Not so much.
Does it matter for a media company that publishes articles a government doesn't like and initiates contact through it's website? Probably.
You're giving CF too much credit. They are very small fish, as it seems from the S-1. But still dangerous because they MITM while operating for free at loss, so don't reuse passwords and logins between sites.
If we trust that metric, it seems significant to me. Not what I would call small fish.
* You won't get allocated any shares
* Trading will start at a ridiculously high valuation, maybe 10x sales or more
https://medium.com/@alexfclayton/zoom-ipo-s-1-breakdown-1192...
Growing >100% YoY, profitable, generating cashflow, NPS above 70, just an all around solid business.
Unless you're one of their many competitors, like, say, AWS. From the S-1:
"Our current and potential future competitors include a number of different types of companies, including:
• on-premise hardware network vendors, such as Cisco Systems Inc., F5 Networks, Inc., Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., FireEye, Inc., Imperva, Inc., Palo Alto Networks, Inc., Juniper Networks, Inc., and Riverbed Technology, Inc.;
• point-cloud solution vendors, including cloud security vendors such as Zscaler, Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. through Umbrella (formerly known as OpenDNS), content delivery network vendors such as Akamai Technologies, Inc., Limelight Networks, Inc., Fastly, Inc., and Verizon Communications Inc. through Edgecast, domain name system vendors services such as Oracle Corporation through DYN, NeuStar, Inc., and UltraDNS Corporation, and cloud SD-WAN vendors; and
• traditional public cloud vendors, such as Amazon.com, Inc. through Amazon Web Services, Alphabet Inc. through Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Corporation through Azure, and Alibaba Group Holding Limited through Alibaba Cloud. "
Wow, they grammar goofed "on-premise" 33 times on their filing. (should be on-premises)
Edit: And Now I am getting downvoted for asking a question.
"premise" is a thought or idea. "premises" is a location, like your servers can be "on-premises". Completely different meanings.
I hear lots of people these days mistakenly saying "on-premise" during hybrid-cloud conversations and in documentation when they really mean "on-premises". (And yes, looks like I've been down-voted for my first hacker news comment too.)
But, every competitor that I’ve tried to use is a train wreck. Zoom just works. All the time, every time.
It has carried them this far, but the real money will be when they turn to advertising (which investors will eventually figure out and insist on).
Remember all the crazy marketing data ISPs wanted to collect, then we pushed everyone to move to TLS? Well Cloudflare unwraps TLS for all their clients and is in a position to collect all the same data.
> I'm sure it's just in my head, but it feels like the first tech IPO in several years where there actually seems to be a viable business model.
The companies listed above have what appear to be viable business models. I didn't intend to comment on technical merits, but I think you may be underestimating the technical depth of what some of these companies are doing.