Cloudflare Gives Us All Another Reason to Boycott Cloudflare
The namespace is already tied to Cloudflare (many domains are outsourcing to Cloudflare on the World Wide Web), which is willing to take losses just to control Web traffic; we need to say "no!" to this online "landgrab"
"Cloudflare proposes the Spotify model for the web," said a blogger earlier this week. It would not be the first such proposal; nor would it be the first company to float such an idea. The blogger said:
Cloudflare posted a 2025 founder's letter and I haven't seen much discussion of it. But, when you read through it, what they discuss and propose is deeply troubling for the web as have and currently know it.
The Net is not free. It never was. The Net always costs money to access (sometimes the price is hidden, e.g. your private information in exchange for temporary access, limited access). ISPs charge you money to access it. Sometimes there are government subsidies for the underlying infrastructure. Sometimes... not. In the UK, for example, we have this thing called "Line Rental"; like "TV Licensing", it helps raise money to pay for the wiring, casual maintenance, upgrades etc (or so goes the official story anyway).
Then, on top of the Net we have the Web. We also have Gemini Protocol. There are many protocols. There's more to the Net than "Web browser" stuff. Many of us use IRC. No 'webapps', thank-you-very-much... why use a 200 megabyte program just to chat to another person in plain text?
If Cloudflare wants to use its vast surveillance network (which is what it does as a CDN) to foist paywalls and maybe something worse (like stubborn DRM on top of all this malarkey), then Cloudflare should be more widely rejected as a company. Set aside the suppressed fact about this company's ties to the US government, including the military.
In a past employer I politely discouraged the use of Cloudflare, which is a foreign company in search of future 'monetisation'. I told clients so. Sometimes they'd have downtime simply because Cloudflare had issues, not because those clients had any technical issues of their own.
So the bottom line is, Cloudflare as a company can say all sorts of horrible things. In many ways it's technically inept and sinister.
The question is, how will the technical society react to those things?
I'd say, let's boycott Cloudflare and in the process try to persuade people and companies to abandon Cloudflare. Tell them about Squid or Varnish Cache (a quiet giant, already very widely used). Tell them about going static to lessen the impact of DDoS attacks, either wilful or not.
Cloudflare isn't a solution in search of a problem. Cloudflare is a problem. █