[Cider9986]

Google I would say yes, but what does Cloudflare gain? They don't run an ad network. Generally I'd say Cloudflare is pretty good to have as a guardian of the web compared to other options.

They protect free speech and allow Tor users. Ever tried completing a reCaptcha on Tor?

[ceejayoz]

Cloudflare gains things like this:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/

https://developers.cloudflare.com/browser-run/quick-actions/...

They create a new problem and sell the solution.

[davidfischer]

Nowadays, somebody can just ask claude to build them a scraper/bot that hooks into a proxy network and all of a sudden they can easily send 20k+ reqs/min from hundreds or thousands of IPs cycling them as they get rate limited or banned. In my work, the scrapers have gotten way more aggressive in the last 2 years or so. Frankly, I'm happy there is a solution.

There may be things to criticize Cloudflare for, but the problem of bots and scrapers destroying the open web was getting worse no matter what.

[YeahThisIsMe]

God damn it.

[arbol]

Tin hat folk say Cloudflare is CIA. I dunno