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Comment by vlunkr | Hacker News Reader

I don't really see how cloudflare fits on that list. There are dozens (hundreds?) of other DNS services. 8chan and kiwifarms have found different providers.

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they're fairly unique in their free DDoS protection. They provide a LOT of security and uptime services for free that you just don't really find elsewhere (at least, the last time I checked; I'm sure they have reasonable competitors by now).

Even if a monopoly is not legally enforced, it can still dominate through quality or market forces or numerous other avenues.

So they are bad because they choose who gets their free service?

You're aware of the concept of dumping? Yes, it's bad to give away a service that undercuts your competitors and puts you in a monopoly position.

Really? So every company that has a free tier is “dumping”?

CloudFlare is not s monopoly even by HN commenters weird definition.

But if you define “dumping” as “selling a product below what it takes to turn a profit”, every unprofitable company funded by YC is doing something illegal.

> Really? So every company that has a free tier is “dumping”?

Offering a sustainable free tier isn't dumping. Funding a free service with profits from a different business is.

> But if you define “dumping” as “selling a product below what it takes to turn a profit”, every unprofitable company funded by YC is doing something illegal.

Some of them have sensible unit economics and just need investment while they scale up. But yes, intentionally or not there is absolutely a whole lot of antitrust violation going on in silicon valley VC.

So what other product does CloudFlare have?

You really think a company can’t legally enter a new market by funding the division from another market?

Was Amazon engaging in “dumping” when it was using the revenue from Amazon to build out AWS? And no “AWS wasn’t started by Amazon selling excess capacity”

You can legally invest into a new business with revenue from your existing business. What's not legal is running a line of business in a way that's inherently unsustainable.

So how is CloudFlare having a free tier not “sustainable” when that’s what almost every company does? Do you think the Google Pixel makes money selling only 800,000 phones a quarter? Would it be sustainable as a standalone company?

Is the “HomePod mini” a line of business? Would it be sustainable if it weren’t subsidized by the rest of Apple?

Are you starting to see how meaningless your definition is?

What? This is nonsense. You can absolutely run a line of business at a loss.

Kiwi Farms has been going offline almost daily due to DDoS and targeted attacks which were previously blocked via CF.

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

Right - Visa, Mastercard, Apple, and Google are walled gardens and should, in my personal opinion, be held to a somewhat higher standard in terms of free speech (Yes, I know that the first amendment doesn't apply to companies. I'm just saying how I think things ought to be, not how they are). It's unreasonable to expect consumers to get a new credit card or buy a new phone to use your service. But companies routinely choose alternate DNS providers and lots of people buy things that aren't on Amazon.

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