I trust Cloudflare more than I trust some other players in the arena. They have a decent track record of being neutral infrastructure provider. They seem technically strong, deploying Rust widely and caring about performance in a way that most firms do not. They're likely covertly funded by intelligence services so they don't have economic incentives to enshitify their offerings or deliberately screw me over.
Put it this way: I'd rather Cloudflare owns the Internet than Google, Meta, Amazon or Alibaba.
Citation? The only case I'm aware of is when they removed DDoS protection for the Daily Stormer[0], and tbqh that made me feel more positively toward them. Yes, it was an impulsive, emotionally-motivated choice but that was relatable to me.
It wasn't an impulsive decision. They kept the Daily Stormer's account active up until Andrew Anglin said CF kept offering him their services because they quietly agreed with him.
> Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. The tipping point for us making this decision was that the team behind Daily Stormer made the claim that we were secretly supporters of their ideology.
> Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare.
Yes, you are quoting from the exact same blog I linked, but you're wrong. It was an impulsive decision[0]
Per Matthew Prince:
"This was my decision. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.
Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company."
This is one of the best, most honest things I've seen a tech CEO write. Contrast this with Zuckerberg's mealy-mouthed weaseling about "policies"[1]. I wish more tech overlords had the honesty to say, "No, we are not a court. We are booting you because we don't like you."
Reddit comments report more such incidents, with Cloudflare demanding an upgrade to Enterprise. This has also come up for other sites, such as gambling sites.
Also, Cloudflare implicitly screws over everyone by leaking data to the NSA.
Huh. When you don't use a man-in-the-middle service, you don't have this problem. When you host on a cloud vendor, you don't have this problem because you control the HTTPS certificate and don't leak it to the MITM. The assumption as such seems silly to me.
Your DNS lookups and IPs in use provide a lot of info. It's not always the data inside an encryption layer that is the most important.
That said, these are US companies subject to FISA court orders and NSLs or National Security Letters. If they want your data, they can just pull it from memory in real time or pull it directly from the hypervisor and dump it wherever they're instructed to. Any idea that your data is protected because you're not even using a provider WAF or doing TLS termination for load balancing is a fantasy.
Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just because they can spy and get some of it, doesn't mean you have to hand all of it to them on a silver platter.
And who even said we're talking about American ISPs and American clouds? I'm sure the NSA can get data from OVH, but not as easily.
I control which DNS server I use. It is not relevant to the matter at hand.
> If they want your data, they can just pull it from memory in real time or pull it directly from the hypervisor and dump it wherever they're instructed to.
You're confusing bulk data collection with highly selective court-ordered data collection. The two are not alike. Attempting to equate them is a dumb attempt at deception on your part. There is no obligation for a firm to share bulk web data with the NSA.
Which is easily sniffable, re-routable, and spoofable unless using DoH/DoT. Those lookups are plaintext. Keep in mind I'm talking about your cloud endpoint.
> It is not relevant to the matter at hand.
Metadata is relevant enough for the US government to drone strike, and relevant enough to issue a collection warrant if one were... desired.
> You're confusing bulk data collection with selective court-ordered data collection.
This is both bafflingly naive and dangerously arrogant.
Just one example, look up FISA Section 702. It does not require a traditional warrant to intercept data. To further this avenue for you, look up the 2024 congressional expansion of Section 702 (via RISAA). This was explicitly done to allow a much broader scope of classification and forced compliance with US intelligence, with extremely limited oversight, and a far reach (they were getting audit fatigue from submitting 702 requests, so why not just do the search and collection and have the courts deal with it later if it's a Real Problem(tm)). This collection doesn't just apply to the datacenter providers, landlords, etc now, it also applies to hardware vendors.
Nothing you say is a valid excuse for complete surrender which is what you're preaching. A responsible person will endeavor in the direction of maximum resistance via maximum encryption. I would rather serve requests at 1/10th the performance than volunteer user data to Cloudflare and the government.
Put it this way: I'd rather Cloudflare owns the Internet than Google, Meta, Amazon or Alibaba.