====== CDN Consolidation and Internet Resilience ======

===== The Scale of the Problem =====

[[https://www.cloudflare.com/|Cloudflare]] currently serves approximately **25% of all Internet sites**. A single private company acts as infrastructure for a quarter of the web — making content delivery decisions, inspecting HTTPS traffic as a reverse proxy, and holding unilateral power over who gets to remain online.

The [[https://pulse.internetsociety.org/en/blog/2025/11/how-consolidation-is-eroding-internet-resilience/|Internet Society has documented]] how this consolidation erodes Internet resilience. The fragility was demonstrated concretely:

  * **November 18, 2025** — a bug in Cloudflare's Bot Management triggered a global outage. Roughly 1 in 5 webpages affected at peak; a third of the world's 10,000 most popular websites down (X, ChatGPT, Spotify, Canva, Downdetector)
  * **December 5, 2025** — a second major outage, 17 days later, caused by a WAF change during a React Server Components vulnerability patch

===== The Privacy Problem =====

Cloudflare acts as a **man-in-the-middle for HTTPS traffic**. As a reverse proxy, it decrypts HTTPS, inspects packets, and re-encrypts on the other side. It sits between you and a substantial fraction of every website you visit.

===== Cloudflare's Ethical History =====

CEO Matthew Prince describes himself as "almost a free-speech absolutist." The institutional pattern:

^ Year ^ Platform ^ Reason Dropped ^ Notable Detail ^
| 2017 | Daily Stormer | Charlottesville attack | Prince said he "woke up in a bad mood" — his own framing |
| 2019 | 8chan | El Paso shooting | Framed as uncomfortable departure from "infrastructure neutrality" |
| 2022 | Kiwi Farms | "Imminent threat to human life" | Prince spent days publishing 2,600-word posts defending continued service, reversed within 72 hours |

After each drop, authoritarian governments cited those decisions as justification for pressuring Cloudflare to drop human rights organizations. Every decision becomes precedent. Every refusal is a policy. The bind comes from accumulating the power in the first place.

===== Alternatives =====

**[[https://bunny.net/|Bunny.net]]**\\
Slovenian CDN. EU-headquartered, GDPR-native. Pay-as-you-go from $0.01/GB. DDoS protection, CDN, edge scripting. No tiered plans that punish growth. Smaller scale than Cloudflare, but a conscience-compatible choice.

**[[https://deflect.ca/|Deflect]]** — see [[folkzone:networking:deflect|Deflect]] for full details\\
Canadian. Non-profit social enterprise (eQualitie, Montréal). Free for civil society, human rights, independent media. Commercial customers subsidize that protection.

**Self-hosted with Cloudflare Tunnel**\\
This homelab uses [[folkzone:services:cloudflared|Cloudflare Tunnel]] for reverse proxy/access — a narrower dependency than using Cloudflare as a full CDN/DDoS layer for public-facing sites. The tunnel provides SSH and service access without exposing ports; it does not proxy all public traffic through Cloudflare's inspection layer.

===== The Astro/EmDash Situation =====

In January 2025, Cloudflare [[https://blog.cloudflare.com/astro-joins-cloudflare/|acquired AstroJS]]. In April 2026, they announced [[https://blog.cloudflare.com/emdash-wordpress/|EmDash]], an open-source CMS built on Astro, positioned as a WordPress successor.

The Gatsby precedent is relevant: Netlify [[https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/01/netlify-acquires-frontend-platform-gatsby/|acquired Gatsby in February 2023]], gutted the engineering team within months, shuttered Gatsby Cloud by August, and never ported the promised features. Gatsby entered dependency hell.

Whether Cloudflare's stewardship of Astro follows the same pattern is unknown. The incentive structure differs — Cloudflare wants Astro to power EmDash, which powers Workers, which is their core business. Netlify wanted Gatsby's enterprise customer list.

===== See Also =====
  * [[folkzone:networking:start|Homelab Networking Index]]

  * [[folkzone:networking:deflect|Deflect — DDoS Protection for Independent Media]]
  * [[folkzone:services:cloudflared|Cloudflare Tunnel (homelab usage)]]
  * [[indieweb:good_web|The Good Web]]
  * [[protocols:smallweb:browser_monoculture|Browser Monoculture]]
  * [[start|Return to wiki home]]
  * [[folkzone:start|Return to folkzone]]