[ebbp]

In principle I agree with this, but do feel this is said more readily about Cloudflare than other companies it could said about - such as Amazon (via AWS), Google and Microsoft.

Perhaps my own mental model is wrong, but I see them as a credible challenger to those very oligopolistic companies, and wish there were more Cloudflares.

[johnklos]

The difference is that nobody complains and most people agree when you talk smack about Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The general consensus is that they're big, dumb and knowingly evil, and most of the time their actions can be explained by that.

When we talk smack about Cloudflare, such as about their hosting of phishing, their underhanded DoH stuff, their complete lack of abuse handling, et cetera, lots of people come to their defense and make excuses for them.

You can like a company's product and still think the company is big and desires to be evil, but there's an emotional component for some that makes "us versus them" knee-jerk reactions more compelling than, "hmmm... is this correct?" evaluations.

I don't think any of these Cloudflare apologists would try to argue on facts that Cloudflare isn't trying to be a monopoly, isn't trying to recentralize the Internet, isn't marginalizing the rest of the non-western world, isn't trying to establish dependencies that people and companies can't easily escape, but if they did, that'd make for some interesting discussion.

[acejam]

To each their own, but I think this is said more frequently about Cloudflare because they are often playing the middleman, via their CDN service. In comparison, AWS and others are the actual origin.

[msmith]

I feel the same way. What about Akamai, Fastly, or Okta? Maybe Cloudflare gets more attention because their low end plans are accessible to anyone.

[risyachka]

Its not just low end plans. Their pricing is basically the only one that feels fair. They don't charge you for bandwidth, unlike others that try to make on it as much as possible, while at the same time having other services also priced significantly higher.

[rvnx]

+ (Global) Cloudflare Workers are amazing compared to Google Cloud Functions or other services that are regional, expensive and slow to start.

[viblo]

They charge for bandwidth if you use enough of it on the enterprise tier.