[dewey]

I'm really getting tired of this kind of take. You never really see that if AWS adds a product, or GCP adds a product or any other products from bigger CDNs.

What do you suggest? Cloudflare should stop releasing products? Regulation that you are only allowed to handle x% of the total internet traffic?

[corytheboyd]

I agree, this rhetoric is getting old.

So we're supposed to go use one of thousands of other tiny cloud platform providers?

Okay let's entertain that idea. The first bare minimum items on your vendor approval checklist are things like "can I trust this business to exist in 10 years" , "do they have enough resources to support me when shit hits the fan", and "are they mature enough to deliver on the shiny bullet points on their homepage and in their sales pitch".

Isn't this process going to naturally select a small handful of providers? What am I missing here?

[endisneigh]

> Isn't this process going to naturally select a small handful of providers? What am I missing here?

No. It's possible to not do a lot and still last a very long time. Consider zippers, YKK has existed for almost a century and they only manufacture zippers.

[badwolf]

"The YKK Group is a Japanese group of manufacturing companies. As the world's largest zipper manufacturer, YKK Group is most known for making zippers. It also manufactures other fastening products, architectural products, plastic hardware and industrial machinery."

followed by

"On September 19, 2007, YKK was fined €150.3 million by the European Commission for running worldwide price-fixing cartels and sharing markets with zipper-makers Prym and Coats."

Perhaps not the best example? (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YKK )

[mschuster91]

YKK has the unique advantage that everyone working with clothing knows that the only brand to deliver consistently high quality is, you guessed it, YKK. There have been a number of HN submissions on that subject in the past.

[endisneigh]

the fact that they were fined isn't really relevant to my point. you can use patagonia if you'd like

[corytheboyd]

I know you know this but there is quite the difference between a multi-faceted cloud compute offering and the thing that holds my hoodie together.

[endisneigh]

The point is that it's possible for a company to focus on one thing for a long time. Do you dispute this?

[corytheboyd]

I am, surprisingly, capable of understanding that companies can exist for long periods of time. Time to walk away lol

[endisneigh]

If you understand that then I don't know why you posted your original comment. It isn't true in theory nor in practice. cya, lol

[teddyh]

> So we're supposed to go use one of thousands of other tiny cloud platform providers?

Capitalism requires competition. If it’s only natural that one company grows larger and better than all others, then this is bad for consumers, and in this case bad for all of us, since it limits who can even be on the internet in any meaningful way.

[corytheboyd]

But doesn't competition... well, compete? That implies winners. There can only be so many winners.

I do not at all understand how anyone is walled off from being on the internet, if anything I feel like it's massively insanely easier to do that today than it was twenty years ago.

It's not like capitalism doesn't have its faults, but using competition to forge winners is literally what it's meant to do. At least in my very basic layman opinion.

[bombcar]

Competition can also result in multiple "winners" - especially when there is a product that could go two ways, so you have two companies that focus on the different ways.

Or when there's no real difference in product so there can't really be a winner (sugar water/Pepsi/Coke).

[skybrian]

There don’t need to be “winners” in every market. Consider the market for grain. Whether suppliers tend to centralize depends on market characteristics.

Keeping markets competitive often does require regulation. (For example, common carrier regulations.) Thriving markets don’t happen by accident; they are often tough to get going and don’t necessarily happen without a stable government that allows trade to happen.

[teddyh]

We only tolerate capitalism since it brings better results for consumers and society. If a “winner” is allowed to take over and have too much control, this condition fails, and it’s time to do some of: 1. break up monopolies, 2. regulate corporate behavior, and/or 3. nationalize industries. And let the cycle start again.

[corytheboyd]

Well, why hasn't that happened yet then? I'm all for dreaming about a utopic perfect world-- I too wish we could just have it. But here we are still, and it just doesn't seem to be changing.

I do think we should point the finger at companies like Amazon and Microsoft before Cloudflare though.

We would also likely not have those companies without capitalism to begin with. Or computers. Which actually sounds pretty nice... haha

[teddyh]

> Well, why hasn't that happened yet then?

It hasn’t happened because revolving doors, fascism, etc. The state, tasked with doing these things, is not doing them.

> I do think we should point the finger at companies like Amazon and Microsoft before Cloudflare though.

Luckily, I have more than one finger to point. There is certainly enough blame to go around. But if you try to argue against criticizing Cloudflare because others also deserve blame, then you’ve lost me.

[nicoburns]

> That implies winners.

It seems to me that competition does not imply winners. At least not permanent winners. The difference between capitalism and a traditional competition being that a traditional competition has an end point (at which point a winner can be declared), whereas capitalism has no ending point and thus can only have a winner for a time.

Imagine a sporting competition that started with 20 teams in a league and every year the bottom team was eliminated until after 19 years there was only 1 team left. We would not want to leave the competition in that state, we would want to introduce more teams to sustain a level of competition. And if the introduced teams consistently had no chance of winning due to the dominance of the top team, then we'd likely change the rules to level the playing field.

[viraptor]

They're a bit different from AWS. First, they have less competition. Like, competition exists, but they really dominate the market and are the only ones onboarding serious traffic for free loss leader accounts. Second, for all their "we're neutral" talk, they regulate a lot of online traffic in a way that AWS never did. AWS cloudfront shield will not cut you off from majority of the popular internet without recourse just because you accidentally tripped some rule.

So yeah, not being able to handle more than x% of the internet traffic (unless they're running a real dumb pipe with only IP routing logic) sounds great. I'd welcome anther Bell systems breakup.

[danwee]

> What do you suggest? Cloudflare should stop releasing products? Regulation that you are only allowed to handle x% of the total internet traffic?

Regulation sounds about right. Monopolies are regulated in the real world, so why don't we do the same in the virtual one?

[teddyh]

> You never really see that if AWS adds a product, or GCP adds a product or any other products from bigger CDNs.

Accusations of hypocrisy is not an argument. Instead of accusing me (and all other detractors) of not criticizing others enough, please elaborate why this isn’t what I described.

Cloudflare (and others) keep releasing products which makes their central role more central and less vulnerable to competition. They ought not to do that, and I would argue for laws which prevent them from doing that if necessary.

Regarding the problem, this kind of problem should not be solved by one central actor. Instead, these problems should be solved by new network and protocol designs.

[jnwatson]

From that line of argument, we should really get folks off Linux. And nginx.

[teddyh]

Is Linux a central actor? No, it’s not; any people could continue development at any time if the current people stop developing it.

Also, the comparison is flawed, since neither Linux nor Nginx are network services.

[onion2k]

please elaborate why this isn’t what I described

Approximately 1/3 of the most popular websites use Cloudflare[1]. That's not really an argument against the fact that Cloudflare might want to be 'the central server of the internet', but it's a suggestion that they have some way to go yet. I'd bet that Google Tag Manager and some AWS services are integrated into more than 1/3.

[1] From https://backlinko.com/cloudflare-users

[teddyh]

What, “They’re not an empire, they only rule ⅓ of the Earth’s surface!”?

Or “Cloudflare cannot possibly be taking advantage of their market share, since they have competition!”?

[jraph]

Google Tag Manager can be down without affecting websites uptime and as a visitor I can block them. I do block them, by the way. So, it's quite central, but at least not really a point of failure.

AWS and Cloudflare, on the contrary… (and also Google products like fonts.googleapi.com, or probably anything under googleapi.com)

[gautamdivgi]

That’s too much government control for my liking. Just being honest. Laws that prevent free enterprise never end well. There should be laws that prevent companies from selling a product at a “loss” to gain market share. But to prevent companies from releasing products is completely different level of control which is undesirable.

[bogomipz]

>"I'm really getting tired of this kind of take."

Which take is that? An opinion or outlook that differs from your own?

>"You never really see that if AWS adds a product, or GCP adds a product or any other products from bigger CDNs."

Sure, you do. When AWS released it's DocumentDB(MongoDB competitor) and "Open Distro for Elasticsearch" there was plenty of uproar, both form the companies behind these products as well as the community. Those concerns were also registered on HN.

[larvaetron]

> I'm really getting tired of this kind of take.

I'm really getting tired of this kind of hand-wavey response.

[endisneigh]

You do see plenty of complaining about Amazon and Google, and yes, [some] people on here are very much pro regulation.