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Comment by clukic | Hacker News Reader

Cloudflare is the professional wall builder you hire to protect your garden.

Tech monopolies have always had a vested interest in locking up user data, dictating the policies, and enforcing their own ownership rights. It used to be that only the largest and most sophisticated companies had the resources to shield that data, but Cloudflare changed all that. Walls are now trivial to set up, and virtually unbreachable, and that has forever changed the character of the internet by enforcing monopolistic policies with such technical precision that they're virtually impossible to overcome.

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No offense, this framing is so dumb. I hate it.

The ‘Internet 3.0’ isn’t coming because of Cloudflare. It’s coming because these monolith big tech companies have an army of engineers who have been centralizing and building it this way for years.

Cloudflare didn’t build these walls, it’s more of a giant boat now navigating it because other companies have no choice.

I like to think of them as giant data ferryman in this regard versus “a wall builder”.

I’m not saying frustrations aren’t warranted but — like come on — have a little perspective of what’s really happening with the Internet and who is actually driving it.

Clearly Cloudflare isn't responsible for the data centralization that is corrupting the internet. They are however, a very sophisticated and efficient enforcer of those policies. They've helped ensure large portions of the web is no longer crawlable, and that serves to consolidate information and power in those tech monopolies.

Aka, SMB's now have access to the same tools the tech monopolies do.

GDPR-like policies will continue to flood as governments partition their Internets and data making it harder and harder to run international Internet businesses.

I'm not particularly happy about things either (especially crawling access), but it will be a net positive whenever you can level the playing field with competition.

When the biggest infringers of data are driving the creation of government policies that only they can circumvent and navigate -- that's a serious, serious problem.

why is it assumed the web ought to be crawleable?

So that we can find things on it without prior knowledge.

You already get a lot of defaults from your vendor (OS, device, browser). Why couldn't these vendors maintain a bigger list of default entrypoints for the web? They already do for "apps".

Plus there is already an endless sea of walled stuff (paywall, "create an account and login" wall, "fill in your address/ZIP code and we'll give you the best price" wall, government filtering wall).

I'm not saying it's great, or it would be great, but currently having 1 (or maybe 1-and-half) search engines is also very far from ideal.

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