[pabs3]

Things like Cloudflare are a natural monopoly. They are most useful when they have servers in datacenters worldwide in every possible location. So it takes a lot of capital to start. So competitors are few to none.

Personally, I'd like to see browsers moving away from HTTP for the web, towards something more P2P, so that there is less need for Cloudflare. Something like; look up your site key in DNS, then look up things signed by it in the BitTorrent DHT, and go from there.

[immibis]

It's nowhere near as much as you think it is.

We think of the internet as one big flat network, but it's actually a conglomerate of separate networks (interconnected by peering and transit agreements). There are a finite number of networks on the internet. Of those, only some are good CDN locations as you don't need a CDN node on every single network. The number of places where you could possibly ever want a CDN location is finite, with three or four digits.

Cloudflare has a presence in 335 cities - a lot, but not an impossible lot. We're not talking about ten million. Ten million dollars, maybe. (Ten million dollars would be $30k per city - respectable)

How many of Cloudflare's customers even care about all 335 cities? If you're a European business with European customers, you only care about the ~10 mainstream internet exchange sites in Europe (e.g. Frankfurt, London). Cloudflare has 59, but I don't think they need 59. If you want to be a Cloudflare competitor and support European businesses, you only need ~10 physical locations. That's an extremely manageable number.

What you want is at least one peering connection to every major European network, and ideally, a hotline to their NOC or a detailed BGP community agreement, to block attack traffic as close to the source as possible.

I should point out that due to the ongoing collapse of US hegemony, a lot of European institutions would like to reduce their dependence on Cloudflare right now.

[mike_hearn]

It's not a monopoly, there are lots of CDNs. Volunteer run P2P networks are vastly more vulnerable to DDoS. CDNs basically are P2P networks of a kind, they're just run by one organization and use dedicated network links for nodes to talk to each other so you can't disrupt the internal network comms too badly by doing DoS.

And the core issue here is that the site owners want it, so a P2P network that couldn't offer bot protection wouldn't get adopted.

[janderson215]

If we went to P2P, how would you get around caching issues/slow propagation of new versions when updates are pushed to a given website? That seems like a dealbreaker unless I’m overlooking something.

[pabs3]

Same as in the not-P2P Cloudflare world, get the data from the only node that has a copy of it, which would be the HTTP server or the P2P node run by the website owner.

[dogma1138]

So CDN with extra steps? In your world Cloudflare or anything like it would be in the best position to make itself indispensable for such a network.

Regular client nodes won’t be the backbone of your P2P network these days since many of them are going to be mobile devices. So you are back to a tiered system where you have nodes which are more suitable for hosting (servers) and most suitable for consumers (clients).