[achingtooth]

"But Jonathan," I hear you say, "by providing a gateway aren't you just making Cloudflare a centralizing institution?"

The problem is the market share of these institutions. Google could argue that they aren't the sole gatekeeper to search since services like DuckDuckGo exist. This isn't really valid when you control a huge amount of the market share. I'm worried about how the internet is becoming super homogeneous, it really hurts startups. I'm not saying what Cloudflare is doing is bad, but the amount of control Cloudflare has is increasingly worrying based of all the services they are launching. Look at what it did to The Daily Stormer (I think they are disgusting and have zero support for them), it's clear that they aren't unbiased. If Cloudflare blocks your service on their VPN, DNS, DDoS protection, IPFS site, Ethereum, etc you are majorly screwed. Most people aren't willing to change their setup just to visit your one service. I still think what Cloudflare does is awesome, not trying to be too negative, just a little worried.

[swiley]

I think with tools like ipfs the situation is similar to git and GitHub. Yes github could screw you over but it takes very little work to get off their platform. With ipfs you just change your DNS (which is something you do every time you update the content anyway.)

[achingtooth]

Yeah you're right, I might just be a little alarmist. Having these services is better than not.

[Kalium]

For most purposes, Cloudflare is a DNS provider and CDN. There is no lack of other providers for these services, most of which would be happy to onboard another paying customer.

Unless you've structured your startup around Cloudflare's workers, I would expect ready pluggability.

[jjeaff]

My understanding of the daily stormer issue was simply that they didn't want to provide their ddos protection for them. Daily stormer was free to find another provider. And there are tons of cdns and ddos protection providers.

So I don't see how what cloudflare did there is any different than a hosting service refusing to serve pornography companies or whatever other unsavory business.

Of course, I realize the controversy was really about consistency in applying their policies. But cloudflare didn't shut anyone down.

[tracker1]

There's always the first to fall... First it was the Nazis and White Nationalist... then the "Alt Right" ... then they labelled anyone they didn't agree with "Alt Right" or "Alt Right Adjacent" ... Now they're coming for the moderates and "TERF" feminists...

It always starts with one point and never recedes to reasonable.

[jjeaff]

And so your point is eventually they will ban half their customers? So what? They aren't even close to the only game in town.

Now if they were a monopoly or oligopoly, I would see your concern.

Private companies have always had the right to refuse service.

[envolt]

Providing a gateway is not making Ethereum centralized. It's just an interface to read (or interact) with a running geth node. It's not mining/validating or contributing to the network.