But they will harass your visitors with captchas for no good reason. I also sometimes run into Cloudflare's "this website is using a protection service" with no way around; it turns out it's a geoblock because it does load just fine when I use a VPN through Germany.
The internet was meant to be decentralized. The IP addresses were meant to be used for routing and for routing only, and otherwise treated equally.
The other fun part about those captchas is they also gatekeep blind people in a way. They're using a service called HCaptcha which doesn't offer an audio alternative like ReCaptcha does. Instead they give you an "accessibility cookie" delivered to your e-mail address, which you can then use to automatically pass the captcha. (Very useful for everyone btw; give it a try.) The problem is that this cookie--and the e-mail address it's attached to--allow CF and potentially HCaptcha to track you around the internet. There's no way to anonymously browse the net through TOR or a VPN unless you create a throwaway e-mail address for that session.
HCaptcha recently expressed interest in creating a text-based alternative, but I wonder how this will stack up against modern AI. For now, it doens't bother me because I don't encounter it often and I have throwaway e-mail addresses, but it's just one more step I have to go through to remain anonymous where any sighted person could just click the traffic lights.
The Internet wasn’t meant be decentralized. The ARPANET was meant to be able to function in the event of a war.
Why would a website care where I'm from?
As far as we can tell no one in China has ever bought our product in the ~15 years it has been available. None of our pages are localized for China. If someone in China wanted a product that does what ours does there are Chinese companies whose products are cheaper and probably better for Chinese users.
Yet last time I checked something like 95% of downloads of our product came from China. I took a bunch of IP addresses from the download logs and looked to see if I could figure out something about these downloaders.
All of them seemed to be at hosting companies, not end user machines. Looking at nearby IP addresses to see what else is hosted at the same hosting company they were mostly scam or borderline scam sites or porn sites. The later was a bit unexpected because at least according to Wikipedia porn and any involvement with it is prohibited in China.
I don't see any good reason I should not block Chinese downloads. We have to pay for the bandwidth they use, they are extremely unlikely to generate any revenue for us even indirectly, and they are coming from sketchy commercial IP neighborhoods rather than end users.
Then they want you even less.
In any case, if a company doesn't want to do business with your country, that's it. What matters whether you want to buy it or not? (Not to mention a lot of the abuse towards developers comes from no buying customers as well - people who want some feature added "before they buy", who just use the trial or free version, etc.).
You can always find a competitor company that does serve you.
It is up to you to harass your visitors or not. CloudFlare does not enforce it. You can disable the firewall if you don't want that kind of protection.
We might argue about whether it should come turned on by default or not, but as far as I remember the default setting is not a strict but a moderate protection level anyway.
> But they will harass your visitors with captchas for no good reason.