If Cloudflare is so vital to the internet, it should be nationalized for the public benefit as having a private entity with so much control over the internet is not a good thing. Corporatized control of the internet should not be encouraged.
I trust a corporation more than I trust the nation you want it nationalized in (America?)
EU maybe. But yes I don't want cloudflare to be part of america after patriotic acts and all the dystopia.
Honestly, cloudflare is not so vital to the internet. Like, The only thing its gonna be a problem if they stop working without giving any way to migrate. Then yes, its gonna be a bit of problem to the internet.
Really? Try distrusting CF certs, and see how much of your internet activity breaks. CF certs should be distrusted, because it's MITM by definition. At the very least, I'd like an addon that makes the URL bar bright red, so I know my connection isn't secure.
Though arguably neither should be in a position to do so without being regulate as a public utility
Also, I know that there are sometimes where cloudflare sits in the middle between your servers and your users for DDOS protection, and so yes theoretically its a point of interception but given how their whole thing is security, I doubt that they would exploit it but yes its a point of concern.
On the other hand, if something like this does happen, migrating can be easier or on the same level if something like this happened on like AWS.
But cloudflare still feels safer than AWS y'know?
That being said, I am all in for some regulations as a public utility but not nationalizing it as the GP comment suggested. Just some regulations would be nice but honestly we are in a bit of tough spot and maybe it was the necessity of the internet to have something like cloudflare to prevent DDOS's.
I think that cloudflare is used by most as DDOS protection and so they still have the servers.
There are also cloudflare workers and pages but even migrating them is somewhat doable as I think that cf workers have a local preview option somewhat available in their node etc., so you could run it locally somehow.
Sure its gonna be a huge huge problem but something that the internet might look past of (I think).
Honestly, I kinda wish that there was a way to have something like how the tor onion links work in the sense that the link has the public key of the person running the server and so uh, no matter if its cloudflare serving the link or something else, its still something that can't be MITM'd for the most part.
Am I right in thinking so? Sure, its gonna make the links longer but maybe sacrifices/compromises must be made?
My opinion is simple, age verification won't work unless they block VPN (something which UK wants to do/ is doing) and that sets a really really bad precedent and I doubt if its entirely possible without breaking some aspects of internet or complete internet privacy.
EU in aggregate is net positive but it still has some things which are kinda flawed regulations that are a bad precedent, but germany kinda blocked the verification thing iirc so there is still a lot of hope and EU does look like its trying its best but I think that it can do just a bit better if they don't think of age verification or some other stuff but that's just my 2 cents.
This was why I added "maybe" tbh. They are one of the best options but even they aren't thaat good. Like its questionable I think and needs a much bigger debate
1934 [1].
[1] https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/ll/usrep/usrep... Humphrey's Executor vs. United States
At least you're referencing the United States in 1934, though. Things were very dysfunctional politically in the US at that time, but not nearly as bad as what was going on in some other parts of the world.
Seriously? You don't see the relevance of independent agencies to this discussion?
And the dynamics of inter-branch checks and balances within the US federal government aren't directly relevant to the question of whether the federal government as a whole is a reliable institution in the first place (nb: it isn't).
You don’t see a reliability difference between a self-moderating and unmoderated system?
Do you see any value in QC?
I don't see there being a distinction between the two in the real world. An institutional system's behavior largely determined by the incentive structures that actually exist on the ground, irrespective of initial intentions or de jure rules.
An institutional system that is expected to self-moderate is one where the motivations that inform its primary behavior are the same ones ultimately informing its self-moderation -- i.e. it's functionally equivalent to an unmoderated system, just more pretextual rationalization.
> Do you see any value in QC?
Sure. But I don't see much value in a QC process that's administered by the same people or judged against the same metrics as the thing it's QCing.
I'd love the equivalent of QC to be applied to both legislation and administrative rule-making in our current system. Maybe with the Loper Bright decision, the courts will gradually resume responsibility for doing this properly. But the capricious and arbitrary nature of the current administration is revealing the extent to which checks and balances are already eroded, and just what an uphill battle that's likely to be.
The entire political system in its current state is riddled with perverse incentives, and the mechanisms of external accountability are totally broken. Even with inter-branch checks and balances, the federal government in its current form is simply not trustworthy.
I mean the reconstitution of AT&T was one of the IMO the biggest middle fingers to the public I've seen. It was broken up because it was a bad actor and now its back again as a worse than ever bad actor. That was kind my wake up call. I'm sure there is worse though that I don't remember because it was not tech related.
I could be wrong I'm not a huge politics person. Either way I don't think any response to me invalidates my opinion that the current government would not do a better job than cloudflare currently is.
I'm not sure that sounds like a good idea, if that's what you're saying.
Maybe if Cloudflare had workplace democracy my concerns would be different, but they don't and wield too much power.
If it also helps I also think 99.99% of big tech should be broken up into separate, probably a few 100, different companies.
So yes, anything vital for the internet should be controlled by the people through democratic norms, institutions, and values rather than dictatorships by those with money over those with none.
Everything reduces to specific people acting on their a priori motivations in bounded contexts, and any system of centralized control is guaranteed to enable expressions of the worst motivations of the people involved. The distinctions you're making -- "private" vs. "public", "corporations" vs. "governments", etc. -- are fundamentally meaningless.
There are no "democratic norms", just norms adhered to by specific people and the factions they form, contesting against each other for power over others. Performative "democracy" is often just cover to allow the currently dominant factions to function as "dictatorships".
Decentralization and individual autonomy are the only solution to the problems you rightly care about, but what you're proposing is literally the opposite of that.