Look, this is a great business strategy.

The first point is data for a reason - the amount of traffic they see enables them to train models with capabilities beyond what the competition can do.

With free tiers it's harder for competition to break into market as they'll need to convince customers that they are getting more for the money than Cloudflare offers for free. Then see point one about data.

Sadly, this creates a choke point for the internet. When Cloudflare is down, "nothing" works. This used to be a problem, but if you're big enough, it's treated like a weather event. See AWS us-east-1 outages, I doubt anyone was compensated for the outage.

So yeah, Cloudflare has a great position.

What worries me is that AI data endpoint they're crafting. I don't think it's good idea that anyone has a hold of that much data.