You know what else is harmful to the concept of the open internet? The enormous malicious botnets and other endemic problems that require a solution like CloudFlare.
This became irritating enough that it caused two side effects: (a) I stopped shopping at Petco, and (b) I moved a pile of sites off of Cloudflare and stopped recommending them, and now sometimes recommend against them.
Cloudflare is still a good, quick, cheap option for sites that receive unusual volumes of malicious traffic, so I'll still recommend them as a solution to some problems. But, they're not a good default.
Cloudflare offered Petco the features to do this as a product and makes money off of Petco's usage of those features. I do sympathize with the perspective that ultimately tools need to be somewhat neutral and it can be dangerous to forward around responsibility. But "tools are neutral" can also be taken to an absurd degree. This isn't 5 levels of indirection here and it's not Petco going and installing a neutral piece software that they downloaded from Github. Petco is a client. They're turning on toggles that Cloudflare built into their user interface and advertises as features.
There's some level of moral accountability there for how those features are abused. I'm not saying it should be illegal, I'm not saying it shouldn't be allowed, but Cloudflare is definitely at least eligible for criticism. This is a product, it's not Petco abusing Cloudflare's infrastructure; they're using the product as intended and advertised.
Is there a 'town square' where we can talk about being presented captchas and similar things from 3rd party intermediates.
I think it's incredibly likely that millions of hours have been wasted on such challenges.
https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
"Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
Imagine if people still thought like this about computers and software.
Not to take away from your point, just that it's all a hindrance.
An open web is open for everyone/thing not just classes of beings you select. Bots and users can both be malicious and both can be positive.
> An open web is open for everyone/thing not just classes of beings you select. Bots and users can both be malicious and both can be positive.
This I agree with. I run an archiver ~monthly on a subset of my month's browsing history, and I'd hate if that got me blacklisted from Cloudflare-backed sites for a benign purpose. (See also the idea of remote attestation)
You know what's infinitely worse? Monopolies.
Half these problems can be fixed by banning certain parts of the world. It's just politically shifted out of the Overton window to do that so CF profits greatly.
