alt Hacker News>Cloudflare are positioning themselves as the gatekeepers
i don't really understand how people on this website seem surprised to find out that cloudflare is in the business of blocking unwanted website traffic.
this is literally what their business is and has always been
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Cloudflare protected people from DDOS. They stopped abusive individuals from removing websites and their content from the Internet. Now Cloudflare is inventing new ways to prevent us from accessing information. They've become the people they swore they would fight. You either die young or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. The side that is good is the side that fights for knowledge and to make it plentiful and available to everyone, including robots. That's what's going to make society flourish. Not this scheming and rent-seeking. Building an empire that panders to resentfulness is like building on sand.
Ironically the AI crawlers I do want to block - the million-IP-strong residential botnets that fake their user agents - Cloudflare doesn't detect at all.
They were DDOS protection first, then expanded into edge caches and reverse proxies. Back then, they did not offer paid services to DDOSers to bypass their protection, or if they did, they were at least discrete about it.