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Comment by dec0dedab0de | Hacker News Reader

They have an accurate internal number of what websites people are going to. They could use this to direct their sales people. They might also use it with their secret score on every user to decide if they need a captcha. They could also just have it in their back pocket as a potential extra revenue stream selling user data.

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The "other than data-mining" part is still unanswered

Isn't this typical tech development? Gain monopoly through free offerings and then squeeze the segment for max profit

Do no evil always comes to a hard stop when investors realize it also means do no capitalism.

Almost like the modern corporate structure is what's really evil. Sixty or Seventy years ago, in the golden age of US manufacturing, companies were mostly privately owned. No shareholders to please. That let them make long-range strategic plays, instead of making short term anti-plays just to make the next quarter number go up.

Google has been offering 8.8.8.8 forever and never charged.

I would presume they're getting plenty of value out of that data.

Tap tap tap, is this thing on?

To quote: The "other than data-mining" part is still unanswered

Commoditize your complement.

Users need working DNS to use Cloudflare’s paid services. That used to be a business in and of itself, where OpenDNS made money showing people ads. But now the market price has been driven to zero.

They have a free offering for anti-malware and anti-porn DNS server (1.1.1.2 and 1.1.1.3). Right now it's targeting for "families", but at some point they could easily monetize this especially to corporate networks.

And from a corporate perspective, historically no one ever got fired for using IBM. Who would you want running your Fortune 500 corporate CDN, a company that can handle 1.3T reqs/day or another CDN provider that's one-tenth the price but doesn't have the scale/reach of Cloudflare?

> but doesn't have the scale/reach of Cloudflare?

Akamai is IBM in this example. They are "enterprise" and have been long before Cloudflare existed and have 4,200 POPs compared to Cloudflare's 250.

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