The thing is, every CDN provider does the exact same thing, and the modern internet wouldn’t work without them. Cloudflare gets a bad rap largely because they offer free and low cost services that are very attractive to individuals, hobbiests, etc.
Companies like Akamai, Fastly, AWS, etc. offer virtually identical services but you may never have heard of them because they mostly only offer services to corporate customers. But their CDNs operate the same way - by deciding the traffic so they can analyze it for purposes of caching it to speed up delivery.
The thing is, every CDN provider does the exact same thing, and the modern internet wouldn’t work without them. Cloudflare gets a bad rap largely because they offer free and low cost services that are very attractive to individuals, hobbiests, etc.
Companies like Akamai, Fastly, AWS, etc. offer virtually identical services but you may never have heard of them because they mostly only offer services to corporate customers. But their CDNs operate the same way - by deciding the traffic so they can analyze it for purposes of caching it to speed up delivery.
Um, no they don’t, at least not the way “CDN” is typically meant. They typically provide a third party domain the website includes stuff from.
Cloudflare also does that, but it’s not the issue here. The issue here is all the MITMing.
Unless Akamai and suchlike silently MITMs your visitors by pretending to be the original site too? in which case yes, fuck Akamai as well.
The modern internet WOULD, in fact, work without them, it just might be a little slower, and you know what? That’d be okay. We’d live.
– Frost