I'd wager that the Super Secret Plan is geared towards further centralizing the Internet. Preferably on Cloud Flare's infrastructure.
This is one part of a tug-of-war that's going on in recent years between Internet network operators and cloud providers, with the cloud providers slowly but surely winning.
For better or worse, we are moving away from a distributed Internet composed of many autonomous networks into a future in which the only job of the ISPs is to connect homes and offices to the local POPs (Points Of Presence) of the large cloud providers.
Why do you need connectivity to other networks when you can get Google (w/ Youtube & GCE) and Facebook from a local POP? Add to that all the sites and services that reside on Amazon, Azure, Cloud Flare, Akamai, and maybe a few more large clouds/CDNs, and you don't need a public Internet anymore. Imagine the security and performance benefits of that!
I don’t think this would fly for a number of reasons, but CloudFlare isn’t exactly a world leader or even a household name. They’re a newcomer in this space and for once they’re actually open with their community (us). If CloudFlare is the villain, then are CenturyLink & Comcast the heroes? By my estimation, we’re more likely to see any kind of doomsday scenario like that executed by cable companies and telcos — which already have a natural monopoly in most localities. I don’t see CloudFlare as having anywhere close to that reach.
These are companies that respond to market pressures. Routing around the network operators (both figuratively and literally) makes a lot of sense for large cloud providers. Especially so if there are no network neutrality rules in place to enforce free access to consumers (as opposed to consumer ISPs demanding payment for pushing content to their subscribers).
Also, the content from Google, Facebook and a couple other cloud providers is what consumers actually want. I've seen internal numbers from a European mobile provider that show that >80% of consumer traffic is to/from either Facebook or Youtube. So are the consumers villains?
> Also, the content from Google, Facebook and a couple other cloud providers is what consumers actually want.
What content from Google and Facebook? If you are referring to YouTube and Instagram - that's one part of the total internet content consumed. Hard to totally ignore the news sites, blogs and streaming services.
Is it still 80% if you filter out passive (streaming) and non-human (heartbeats, tracking, analytics) traffic?
If you measured that by doing a count() and group by on the domains of a traffic log, it would be easy to draw a conclusion that doesn't meaningfully reflect real user activity.
There is a big difference between traffic numbers of youtube and surfing the net. I may have a documentary open in the background while I read dozens of other websites.
CloudFlare is definitely large enough to raise concerns about centralization of the Internet. You don't have to be a household name for that (e.g. Akamai isn't either). Their site says that their infrastructure "powers nearly 10% of all Internet requests".
They aren't a villain, they're an illustration of market forces currently favoring centralization. Like CenturyLink and Comcast, for that matter.
That’s a very harsh dismissal and I don’t think it holds up well because it ignores the difficulty of switching. You can switch CDNs quickly, without needing any user actions, whereas it’s considerably more work to switch cloud providers and even harder to get users to switch their usage.
Here's the issue that everything fights when talking about Centralization vs Decentralization.
Centralization is far easier to manage. A single entity has the ability to control all routes and all the pieces of the network. The structure can become faster, mesh-networks are notoriously slow. By using a VPN + Argo cloudflare has control over how your data is routed, and can make sure it skips slow network segments, is peered well, etc.
Decentralization doesn't require trust if implemented correctly. This is it's biggest selling point IMO. If implemented correctly (which is hard to do) it can have better uptime, as we aren't relying on any single entity. But, with meshnetworks as an example, a specific route could be slower then the others, and there's often not much you can do about it. Decentralization if not implemented correctly is a nightmare on so many levels. There's nobody to appeal to if an issue occurs. If trust isn't implemented correctly (current state of ISPs) then we have multiple parties who can spy/modify your communications.
Or put another way - decentralization may be able to offer greater resilience and reachability - but it will never result in better performance or stability.
Contemplating this makes me happy that HN (among other sites I frequent) doesn't use one of these big providers (though it used to use Cloudflare). May it always stay that way.
This is still better than only having competition at the ISP level since it's easy to switch VPN's. Building a network like Cloudflare is no easy task, but neither is building a mobile network or installing fiber.
While not in itself neutral, it seems like it should help to preserve the competition that network neutrality is supposed to enable, since it's easy for small organizations to hook up with Cloudflare and they do encryption where they can.
I'm reminded of Galbraith's theory of countervailing power, which seems like a more realistic approach than always thinking in terms of centralization versus decentralization:
This is one part of a tug-of-war that's going on in recent years between Internet network operators and cloud providers, with the cloud providers slowly but surely winning.
For better or worse, we are moving away from a distributed Internet composed of many autonomous networks into a future in which the only job of the ISPs is to connect homes and offices to the local POPs (Points Of Presence) of the large cloud providers.
Why do you need connectivity to other networks when you can get Google (w/ Youtube & GCE) and Facebook from a local POP? Add to that all the sites and services that reside on Amazon, Azure, Cloud Flare, Akamai, and maybe a few more large clouds/CDNs, and you don't need a public Internet anymore. Imagine the security and performance benefits of that!