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Comment by xacky | Hacker News Reader

I don't consider Cloudflare part of the "real" internet anymore, instead it's a private intranet that got too big.

This is my worry. What is cloudflare exactly? What regulations are they under? Am I and my privacy protected? How much of my privacy do I need to give up for whats essentially part of a protection racket, be it intentional or not. What happens when I use their SSL, can they sniff my packets? What intelligence and law enforcement do they work with? As someone with vulnerable and targeted identities its a lot harder to hand over my autonomy to what's essentially the modern 1980s IBM or whatever. This is a closed for-profit company that exists to maximize shareholder value, not protect me.

Its incredible we took a decentralized model and centralized it with things like cloudflare and social media. I think we need pushback on this somehow, buts hard right now to see how its possible. I think the recent talk about federation has been helpful and with the world falling into right-wing dictatorships, this privacy and decentralization is more important than ever.

Cloudflair is what happens when a platonic idea of the internet clashes with market realities. All the questions posed are very important but most websites are run by businesses with motives about as pure as Cloudflair’s.

As for people… A programming club I attended is filled with people who run homelabs, use Linux and generally dislike anything corporate. The project to switch communication of discord is now more than a year old. I do feel sometimes that resistance against corporate internet is futile.

Cloudflare is what happens when the internet as a platonic idea fails to come up with a sensible answer to ddos attacks. When there's no pipe fat enough to take the traffic a moderate DDoS can bring to bear, you need means of filtering in a distributed fashion, and in way the internet is organised that takes connections and hardware which are essentially impossible for a small operation to muster.

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