Ok, while I fully respect Cloudflare's contribution to some aspects of privacy and open internet, there's a few things where they are actively working on centralising the web.
Or what to take of:
- captchas so things like recently discussed marginalia.nu can't easily index sites behind CF?
- per-country restrictions for visiting their customer web sites (stopping legitimate users from visiting parts of the web depending on their current location, but also reducing the value of VPNs)?
Basically, coming from Serbia, I've been stopped from visiting US-based web sites by CF increasingly commonly in the last few years: they make this all too easy for their misled customers (companies thinking that their US-based-businesses might not get significant business outside US).
And sure, each individual company could block visitors based on GeoIP data itself, but if this was not a few clicks, they would probably not bother. A large player like Cloudflare thus provides a net negative for the decentralisation of the web.
Or what to take of:
- captchas so things like recently discussed marginalia.nu can't easily index sites behind CF?
- per-country restrictions for visiting their customer web sites (stopping legitimate users from visiting parts of the web depending on their current location, but also reducing the value of VPNs)?
Basically, coming from Serbia, I've been stopped from visiting US-based web sites by CF increasingly commonly in the last few years: they make this all too easy for their misled customers (companies thinking that their US-based-businesses might not get significant business outside US).
And sure, each individual company could block visitors based on GeoIP data itself, but if this was not a few clicks, they would probably not bother. A large player like Cloudflare thus provides a net negative for the decentralisation of the web.