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Comment by jallen_dot_dev | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone else worried about how Cloudflare keeps putting out great solutions day after day? They're getting too big because people are too satisfied with them. That's a bad thing, because one day in the future they might take away or change these offerings.

We need shittier solutions. That way we never feel the pain of once having a good solution to a problem and then losing it.

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great solutions is maybe an overstatement. If you build a bridge that puts everyone else out of business, and later discriminate on what traffic is allowed on the bridge, and after that you put an expensive toll booth on that bridge, that's a problem for everyone else if no one else can compete. At some point, you are doing society a disservice. At some point, great solutions become meager solutions by merit of a monopoly's ownership.

The solution is to make the internet itself resilient to this mode of attack. Not to create a single company big enough to gatekeep and spy on the whole network and to just trust them to act virtuously forever.

How did anyone cross the river before the bridge was built? If the bridge falls into disrepair or they start charging people an arm and a leg to use it, what stops someone else from coming along and building a better bridge? If Bridgeflare abuses their market position to prevent anyone else from building bridges then that could be rectified with government intervention, as in any other industry. I just don't get why there is so much FUD when they haven't, as far as I've seen, done anything to warrant it.

Cloudflare is a cancer and a lot of people are expressing that same sentiment. I think maybe only non-technical people are satisfied with them because they don't have a deeper understanding of what's happening.

Ok so the reason this painfully predictable reaction every time Cloudflare is on HN is because HNers have such a deep understanding of "what's happening." Got it.

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