[QuantumNoodle]

All good points.

> ... build checks and balances to avoid sleepwalking into a dictatorship.

This resonates well with me. I don't personally know the checks and balances that need to exist so that Cloudflare, or any big influential company, refrains from becoming evil. I find CF relying on open protocols for interoperability with vendors a very positive sign. I don't ever see them (or any company) backtracking of supporting some open standard once they already have support for it. I'm not aware of them having "custom" solutions that also don't have a spec for them. For example, they are absolutely best suited for the pay-per-[ai]crawl business model and if they wanted they could have easily taken advantage of their position. Instead they are relying on open standards and contributing to them. Paint me naive but this gives me a good deal of confidence of the short and medium term.

But I confess that I don't follow the company/market closely enough to know if that is enough or more is needed. More check and balances always seems good but I have no creativity in this regard. Perhaps that was one of my criticisms with the author's post - to collect all the bad press and identify the shortcomings but to stop short of digesting all those findings into a meaningful resolution.