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Comment by estebank | Hacker News Reader

The companies relying on cloudflare won't be in Spain. If you buy a GPS tracker by a Canadian company, developed in India, manufactured in China, they are unlikely to know, even it they cared, that a single country that accounts for a tiny percentage of their sales breaks fundamental internet infrastructure on the regular "because fútbol y dinero".

And when purchasing a product, there's no "bill of materials" telling you about the services it relies on, beyond "internet connection" at best.

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>fundamental internet infrastructure

I'm not saying this situation isn't bullshit, but the bigger problem is that CloudFlare is now "fundamental internet infrastructure". This is precisely the situation that the internet was designed to prevent.

Yesterday I got stuck in endless CloudFlare CAPTCHA's, trying to access theretroweb.com. I had to give up. Many such cases. I hate CloudFlare so much, it's unreal.

> This is precisely the situation that the internet was designed to prevent

Right, but on the other hand, our constitution and laws are supposed to give us the rights to access a internet where the government cannot block entire companies who host websites, because a few bad websites are hosted there.

Not to mention all us freelancers, contractors and just in general computing users, who sometimes want to continue working although 90% of the country is watching football, we should be able to do so even if pirates use Cloudflare for shitty stuff.

I agree that Cloudflare sucks, people should avoid defaulting to putting Cloudflare in front of absolutely everything they do and I too get stuck at the CAPTCHAs sometimes. But that doesn't remove the fact that Cloudflare, just like every other lawful company, should be allowed to be visited during La Liga matches.

I’d love for a way to put all my sites behind Cloudflare only during La Liga matches.

Why?

Because if everyone did it, the absurdity of La Liga being able to Iran the entirety of the Spanish internet might become apparent.

Easier to boycott La liga matches. They are the root problem.

The LaLiga post seem to accuse Cloudflare of unlawful activity directly by protecting criminals, not just the illegal streamers. At least my reading (of Google translation) is that they target Cloudflare here and it works "as expected" since Cloudflare is the bad guys.

It takes very little money to rent massive botnet capacity to perform crippling DDOS attacks. Unfortunately there are only very few CDNs capable of absorbing that kind of attack.

I’d happily use anything else, but it (with CF Tunnels and its DDoS and caching systems) is what lets me self host on my little home server on today’s internet. Would gladly move to some other system (or systems)

> This is precisely the situation that the internet was designed to prevent.

Geoff Huston discuss this a few months back. The economic incentives helps shape centralized internet, to the point that most of today's traffic is cache push and private peering between major providers, rather than network transit.

https://blog.apnic.net/2025/08/21/podcast-the-inevitability-...

Which kind of make sense, since with peering both end of the infra (if separate entity) can negotiate for better terms upfront. While the latter is basically unpredictable opex based on traffic shape and routing algorithm.

> breaks fundamental internet infrastructure

I think lots of countries block Cloudflare whole-sale.

Laundering IP addresses for (or against) shady purposes is, in fact, Cloudflare's whole business. It's a wonder Cloudflare isn't being blocked more often.

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