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by joepie91_ 3630 days ago
Right, but this is the pretty much precisely the problem. It's just the Nth generation of "just centralize the internet through us and we'll take care of everything for you", but this time marketed at startups. All the usual problems with centralization still apply.

(It's still not really "DDoS protection", by the way. They just don't offer that on their free plan.)
2 comments
manigandham 3630 days ago
The internet is already very centralized far beyond a single CDN company. All you need to do is look at the number of backbone providers and ISPs serving the vast majority of people in the world.

CloudFlare being a CDN has very little lock-in and is incredibly easy to move away from, so it speaks to how much value they deliver with their product that they have so many customers.

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giovannibajo1 3630 days ago
It only matters because they have no competitors, otherwise you'd say the same applies to AWS hosting the origin servers, and the databases of those very startups likely to use Cloudflare.

In the end, if there were true competitors, it probably wouldn't matter much, they would be just one popular service that handed your data like many others

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manigandham 3630 days ago
They also have plenty of competitors, the CDN space has more companies than the ISP space so the internet is already more centralized at a much deeper level. This a silly claim by the OP.
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