Cloudflare is in the wrong here. They want to "protect" people from their own ISPs, from nefarious web and DNS servers that'll "sacrifice the privacy of users" by - you guessed it - doing exactly the same thing themselves. They've given very little reason to trust them, while giving plenty of reasons to think they might be evil (like protecting known spammers / scammers / phishers).
If another company did what Cloudflare does and homogenized tons of requests behind them, you can bet Cloudflare's CAPTCHA systems would block them in a second.
I have zero respect for Cloudflare's inability to answer criticisms about what they do, about their constant deflections from simple, straightforward questions, and the fact that they do to others what they would never accept anyone else doing to them. It's hypocrisy in the service of trying to become a monopoly by re-centralizing the Internet.
Don't believe me? Go ahead and look for examples of Matthew Prince addressing concerns that much of the non-western world can't access Cloudflare fronted sites because of Cloudflare's "reasons". When you don't find any that have more than just vague platitudes and handwaving, imagine how you'd feel if you were one of those multiple billion people.
If another company did what Cloudflare does and homogenized tons of requests behind them, you can bet Cloudflare's CAPTCHA systems would block them in a second.
I have zero respect for Cloudflare's inability to answer criticisms about what they do, about their constant deflections from simple, straightforward questions, and the fact that they do to others what they would never accept anyone else doing to them. It's hypocrisy in the service of trying to become a monopoly by re-centralizing the Internet.
Don't believe me? Go ahead and look for examples of Matthew Prince addressing concerns that much of the non-western world can't access Cloudflare fronted sites because of Cloudflare's "reasons". When you don't find any that have more than just vague platitudes and handwaving, imagine how you'd feel if you were one of those multiple billion people.