[kordlessagain]

I concur and have been talking about this for a while.

The fact is, Cloudflare is a man-in-the-middle. That's their focus, that's their purpose.

They will limit your local crawler from accessing pages. They will demand you use their crawler.

They will decrypt your traffic if they get a warrant. They always decrypt your traffic anyway, but they will give it to state actors if they demand it.

That's not to say anyone should break the laws, but the issue right now is that intellectual property is incompatible with what is coming with AI.

I don't hate on Cloudflare because it's a bad service. It's actually pretty good, but the fundamental problem is they make their purpose to be a single choke point of all data on the Web.

That's not right. It never was.

[gonzalohm]

Careful I posted something similar in another Cloudfare thread and people threw at me like lions.

They don't see anything wrong with one entity controlling most of the internet traffic

[kordlessagain]

I'm done being careful.

[gruez]

>They will limit your local crawler from accessing pages. They will demand you use their crawler.

Source? According to cloudflare, their crawling service don't get any special treatment from their WAF/CDN.

[kordlessagain]

Come on. I'm not here to Google things for you. Go investigate.

[gruez]

>Come on. I'm not here to Google things for you.

And what, I'm here to do research for your arguments?

[kordlessagain]

No, you aren't. The substantive argument was about the single choke point they represent and the decrypting of traffic. Nevertheless, you need not agree with my claim that they "require" you to use their crawler, and it's your prerogative to push back on this particular part of my comment.

Cloudflare provides services that any of their users may enable to charge crawlers for access. And they announced a while ago that this was going to be enabled by default on new domains, whether the customer asked for it or not (and there is plenty online about people wondering why they aren't being crawled). When it is enabled, Cloudflare either blocks, require registration of the crawler (forcing enabled billing), or provide one themselves: https://developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post/2026-03-10-...

My compressed claim was close enough (in my opinion), given the substantive argument was broader: chokepoint, MITM, decryption, the IP vs AI tension.

It's the same pattern as Flock cameras quietly becoming the default license plate surveillance layer across US cities. Private infrastructure is becoming the substrate for something that used to be public or distributed, with the concentration happening faster than any deliberative process about whether we want it.

I'm willing to be wrong on any specific piece of this. But chasing down receipts for every line is effort, and I'm tired and old. The shape is what matters, and the shape is a man-in-the-middle.