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 Internet Society has documented how this consolidation erodes Internet resilience. The fragility was demonstrated concretely:
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.
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.
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.
Deflect — see 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 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.
In January 2025, Cloudflare acquired AstroJS. In April 2026, they announced EmDash, an open-source CMS built on Astro, positioned as a WordPress successor.
The Gatsby precedent is relevant: Netlify 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.