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by jefftk 1232 days ago
> Monopolistic Control of the CDN Market: Another issue is the monopolistic control that Cloudflare has over the CDN market. As one of the largest CDN providers...

This is a silly piece, but the claim that Cloudflare is so big that they can push sites around doesn't make sense. Not everyone has released 2022 revenue yet, but in 2021 Akamai took in $3.5B to Cloudflare's $0.66B, Fastly's $0.35B, and Edgecast's $0.29B. Then consider that while we don't have separate revenue numbers for Amazon Cloudfront, Google Cloud CDN, or Azure CDN they're all serious contenders. If Cloudflare offers you bad terms you have many other companies that want your business.
2 comments
byyll 1232 days ago
Size is not measured by revenue alone. Cloudflare has a 75.6% market share among reverse proxies and 17.6% of all websites use it. [0]

[0] https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/proxy

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jefftk 1231 days ago
This is weighted by site, and counts cnn.com and jefftk.com equally. My understanding is Cloudflare is dramatically disproportionately popular among small sites, I think because of how generous their free plan is? If they were 76% of traffic I'd be worried, but I think a majority of the sites using CF probably are signed up because "why not?", which doesn't actually give CF that much power.
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byyll 1231 days ago
It does count them equally and I agree it's popularity is mostly because of the free tier. From the same website, there is a graph and Cloudflare is lower for high-traffic websites than Cloudfront, Akamai and Fastly. [0] But regardless, that gives Cloudflare power over a lot of sites.

[0] https://w3techs.com/diagram/market_technology/cn-cloudflare

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sybercecurity 1232 days ago
They used to write the same stories about Akamai, Microsoft, Google, etc. when they first got big. It's just Cloudflare's turn in the box.
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