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by nickysielicki 264 days ago
> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare.

Nothing in their idea challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to compete in constructing a reverse proxy service with LLM-centric content controls similar to cloudflare, whether that’s AWS WAF or akamai or some new startup.
3 comments
lapcat 264 days ago
Nothing in Google's search monopoly challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to complete...

From the stats I've seen, Cloudflare has an 80% market share for reverse proxy services. 20% of all websites use Cloudflare, 50% of the most popular websites globally. That's a dangerous amount of concentration, and it's the only reason Cloudflare can propose this new business model for the internet and be taken seriously.

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acdha 264 days ago
Google’s monopoly is dangerous because they linked success in search to dominance in other areas, and especially the most popular web browser.

I wouldn’t recommend trusting any large company but so far Cloudflare doesn’t appear to be pulling a Google because they sell directly rather than to third parties. Google never charged for search so they ended up doing a reverse acquisition into DoubleClick to get advertisers to pay for the searches we do. Cloudflare does have a free tier but their paid services are decidedly not free and since they have serious competition in the CDN business, zero-trust, etc. they have the direct incentive not to screw their customers which Google lacked. I’d get worried if that ever changes.

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lapcat 264 days ago
> Google’s monopoly is dangerous because they linked success in search to dominance in other areas

That's precisely what's happening here: Cloudflare is leveraging its CDN dominance to become a kind of payment processor for the internet.

> they have serious competition in the CDN business

Do they? I just said they have 80% market share.

> they have the direct incentive not to screw their customers which Google lacked

Google Search is free service for users but a paid service for advertisers. The advertisers are Google's customers. Theoretically, Google has an incentive not to screw its customers, but practically they can, because of their search monopoly.

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visarga 264 days ago
> Cloudflare is leveraging its CDN dominance to become a kind of payment processor for the internet

Seems like the moment is ripe for this move. In recent news Google partnered with stablecoins and traditional payment processors to create an agent-to-agent micropayment system (AP2)

https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/a...

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raincole 264 days ago
> Nothing in Google's search monopoly challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to compete...

But it's true? It's still true today. The only worrying part of the story is that google also makes browser and OS, which doesn't apply to Cloudflare.

The above comparison to App Store is even weirder / more ridiculous. App devs publish on App Store because App Store is pre-installed on every iPhone already, so it maximizes the number of users they can reach. Websites use Cloudflare to protect themselves, at the cost of reducing the number of users they can reach. The two situations are so different that "false equivalence" is an understatement.

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lapcat 264 days ago
> The only worrying part of the story is that google also makes browser and OS, which doesn't apply to Cloudflare.

Well actually: https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-future-of-the-ope...

> App devs publish on App Store because App Store is pre-installed on every iPhone already, so it maximizes the number of users they can reach.

This seems like a weird statement, because App Store is the only way of publishing apps on iPhone. The statement might make sense if you were talking about the Mac, on which App Store is pre-installed, but developers can still publish outside the App Store.

> Websites use Cloudflare to protect themselves, at the cost of reducing the number of users they can reach.

How does Cloudflare reduce the number of users they can reach?

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raincole 264 days ago
> https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-future-of-the-ope...

Yeah and if it succeeds (while unlikely) it proves Google-style monopoly isn't that bad and permanent.

> because App Store is the only way of publishing apps on iPhone

You're going to be really surprised to find out iOS porn game is a thing in Asia :)

But that's not my point. My point was Cloudflare and AppStore are very different things.

> How does Cloudflare reduce the number of users they can reach?

Any barrier would affect the number of users you reach. Even just a capcha or +200ms loading time.

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nickysielicki 264 days ago
So what? I should hate them for that? Cloudflare is really good at what it does. Nobody has to use cloudflare, but people who know what they’re doing choose cloudflare because the service they provide is worth the minuscule price they charge and it solves the massive abuse and performance problems that otherwise plague the internet.

Bing/msn.com failed to displace Google because Google was simply better, not because Google played dirty.

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jrm4 264 days ago
Whenever anyone says "Oh so I should hate company X" you know you're in for a bad, stilted argument that's going to defend some very narrowly defined thing.

Companies, by their nature, grow and take over things for the purposes of making money - tech companies moreso. We have seen companies overstep in the past.

Please don't stifle reasonable concerns with this sort of inflammatory rhetoric.

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nickysielicki 264 days ago
There's nothing reasonable about your concern. My original reply two levels up explains why: they have competitors and the service they provide is highly fungible.
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lapcat 264 days ago
> So what? I should hate them for that?

Where did I mention hate? I don't care what emotions you feel or don't feel. The problem is the concentration of power in one company. That has nothing to do with emotion.

> Bing/msn.com failed to displace Google because Google was simply better, not because Google played dirty.

I don't think the courts agree with you about Google playing dirty. In any case, monopolies are inherently dangerous.

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nickysielicki 264 days ago
> Where did I mention hate?

Substitute whatever adjective you want. You're spreading FUD about the cloudflare boogeyman while ignoring the fact that they have well funded competitors and have no technical mechanism whereby they could lock anyone into their so-called reverse proxy monopoly.

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rickydroll 264 days ago
It could be interesting to build a small startup that identifies hate speech on Twitter, Threads, Blue Sky, and other platforms.

I envision a UI that displays the message and, in a sidebar, lists what aspects of the message classify it as hate speech. Then, like a spam filter, you could decide to block the message.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1084806... https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01577 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03346

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jrm4 264 days ago
But everything in their idea challenges the idea of the Internet as a public-ish good.
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