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Comment by Fizzadar | Hacker News Reader

We really need a competitor(s- ideally) to CF because it’s heavily centralising the internet and this highlights exactly why that is a problem.

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There are multiple competitors though.

See: Azure Front Door, Amazon CloudFront, Google Cloud/Media CDN, Akamai, Fastly, BunnyCDN, and so on.

People are _choosing_ to use Cloudflare, whether that's based on cost, features, or even just brand recognition - but lack of options isn't the case.

Cloudflare has easiest usability and generous free tier

And yet it still has competitors.

Free tiers are probably one of the most damaging practices for competition in the market for cloud services

Weird take. I might try all the services with free tiers, see which one works the best, and give that service my business in the long term. Like, how else to evaluate competing vendors? If there’s no free tier it means everything I want to try requires I wade through “sales motion”, and I’ll end up picking conservatively based on reputation because it’s harder/more annoying to evaluate multiple vendors. That seems less competitive - “no one got fired for buying IBM” attitude.

There's a difference between free tiers and trials. A trial is fine, but the unlimited free tiers offered now are a part of a race to the bottom that make it so only the largest, most investor-backed companies and loss-leaders can effectively compete.

Sure, it’s great from the consumer perspective in the short run. But how much does needing a free tier to attract customers raise the barrier to entry for the market? The only companies that can compete are those with existing infrastructure and revenue streams that can subsidize their losses. Even ZIRP couldn’t counteract that. There is a reason that predatory pricing is illegal.

Would strongly recommend Lina Khan’s “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox”

This. They caught me when they started offering decent DNS UI, held me when they gave me one-click SSL, and sealed the deal when they let me buy domains at cost.

I don't care what AWS offers because there's no way I'm venturing into that for my simple domains.

I'm all for competition, but smaller players would have been completely blocked by Privacy Shield, whereas they cannot block CloudFlare completely without breaking a lot of other sites.

And CloudFlare went to court. Most companies would not be able to afford it.

The CDN industry is shrinking, not growing. There isn't any margin to play with anymore.

Any viable competitor to Cloudflare is going to have to have big coffers, or take on tons of VC debt up front. Even then, it's a race to the bottom on prices.

I think the product offerings from CDN companies are the best / most interesting they’ve ever been, compared to the overall IaaS space. “Edge computing” was a meme phrase a few years ago but really there’s no way to beat the speed of light besides putting your stuff closer to users.

I can't believe Cloudfront is priced anywhere close to cost to AWS. They must have huge margins.

Maybe, but The Pirate Bay (at least last week when I looked) were sending cf-ray cookies, so I assume CF are "helping"/"protecting" (depending on what service they're using?) them, and The Pirate Bay's sort of been around (despite best efforts by some governments) for years...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard

Seems like they're willing to take anyone as a client

>Researchers and journalists have alleged that many of DDoS-Guard's clients are engaged in criminal activity, and investigative reporter Brian Krebs reported in January 2021 that a "vast number" of the websites hosted by DDoS-Guard are "phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online".[3][1] Some of DDoS-Guard's notable clients have included the Palestinian Islamic militant nationalist movement Hamas, American alt-tech social network Parler, and various groups associated with the Russian state.[3][4][1]

...including piracy sites

>DDoS-Guard provides services for the popular video game piracy website FitGirl Repacks

>Sci-Hub switched from Cloudflare to DDoS-Guard for DDoS protection.

There are! But most have only a small part of marketshare. The issue is less so in services provided and more so in sheer scale. Hopefully that will change eventually :)

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