I think it counts as "allowed" regardless of utility. CF is so massively over-weight on the internet that it's impossible to trust them with anything because if they can be forced to do something by a hostile government (hint: they can be!) then they can get away with it invisibly and affect billions of people.
That is something that should not be allowed to exist. It's one of the reasons monopolies (or even majority-opolies) are bad. It's a weapon hanging on the wall, waiting to be used.
Then I think the real question is why haven't any serious competitors emerged that can handle the essential services that Cloudflare provides?
Are there network effects like what happens with Microsoft in the business computing space? With Microsoft, I'm also aware of a great amount of anti-competitive behavior, and though I haven't seen that from Cloudflare personally and haven't heard accusations of it, I also haven't paid attention.
When I learned econ 101 in high school there was a concept of a "natural monopoly" like an electricity utility, a concept that was probably mostly post-hoc rationalization of the regulatory structures that were chosen a century ago, but it at least was a coherent narrative. I can't see any coherent narrative about Cloudflare's services being a natural monopoly. So I'm left wondering if they are just way better at what they do than anybody else, and perhaps the space isn't big enough to drive a competitor to enter it?
I hope somebody on HN has a much better explanation of this than I do.
I suspect a big part of it is that CF is running other businesses on the side, and offering basic features at a loss - they've artificially depressed the price of the service so it's hard to compete with them on only that service.
Everyone using the free service likes that, of course, but honestly I wish we'd make it illegal to do. It's heavily used as a way to steal small markets simply by being successful in a different large one.
> Everyone using the free service likes that, of course, but honestly I wish we'd make it illegal to do.
I can see the benefit, but if you made free services illegal companies like google would just offer gmail for a penny.
You'd could go farther and say that no one should be allowed to provide a good or service for less than it costs them to provide it. That still has problems though. For example, Netflix sends servers to ISPs to set up on their network so that segments of that ISP's customers are pulling data from one of those boxes distributing the load. ISPs are happy to do it because it means fewer customers call them to complain about slow speeds/buffering issues with netflix. If netflix wanted to start selling CDN services to others, having all those boxes at every major ISP in the nation means the cost to deliver that service will be much lower for netflix than it would for some new start up. You can't really make it illegal to offer a service at a price lower than it would cost the poorest and least efficient/capable would-be competitor though.
We'd also risk losing a lot. Everyone would be forced to pay youtube some amount proportionate to what it costs for youtube to exist. There are also extremely expensive to run services like the internet archive which would be bad to price people out of
There are plenty of ways to mitigate that "losing a lot" (like government subsidies: run X, get paid $Y per Z -> easier access for both users and providers. we already do this for a lot of research and tons of industry, it's not some utopian dream), and since a lot of the free internet stuff we have now is ad-supported and addiction-oriented... I'm not convinced that'd be bad to lose. The adtech business causes horrific damage, and is consistently used as a weapon against people (ICE buying info commercially to get around laws that would normally block their access, for example). Not everything has to be allowed to exist.
For Internet Archive: IA is a non-profit that currently runs fine on donations, not ads, and in a healthier environment they'd get subsidies because they serve a clear public benefit, one which the government also relies on fairly frequently. They're a wildly different category of business than Cloudflare, both obviously and legally, and I think they'd be fine. And we'd be significantly better off if they had competition, because that'd serve as a distributed, duplicated backup.
I'm not claiming it'd be trivial, or perfect. I'm claiming it'd be worth the effort.
Maybe you could avoid the thornier issues entirely by outlawing the adtech industry instead of free services. With the backbone of surveillance capitalism out of the picture most of the free services would stop existing or move to pay models anyway. Worthwhile free services like the internet archive and wikipedia that aren't spying on users could continue to exist without worry. We'd still lose youtube I think, but maybe video hosting isn't best centralized either.
yes, I think that's a good idea too. and possibly easier to achieve.
I don't think advertising is inherently bad, and at some point you get ambiguous about "is this advertising or is it just describing something so I can find it in a search engine" and it's literally impossible to eliminate it all. and being able to tell people with problem X that solution Y exists can be a good thing, in moderation. it's more that the current maximally-invasive insanity and e.g. tons of highly distracting billboards are probably a net loss for humanity. São Paulo shows that it's quite nice without it, for example.
Seems more of a moral hazard of government intervention than of ventures whose economies of scale demand large market cap to most economically serve customer needs.
"Most economically" can be bent to nearly any purpose, there's almost always a cost-benefit to owning more of what you do, or externalizing costs onto others. It's not enough of a reason, and it's why laws restricting private behavior to serve the greater public exist.
Which is very nearly the only reason to have governments: forcing restrictions that lead to better results in aggregate.
(malicious control is another reason, but you kinda can't argue public benefit there)
That is something that should not be allowed to exist. It's one of the reasons monopolies (or even majority-opolies) are bad. It's a weapon hanging on the wall, waiting to be used.