> The internet we knew was open and not trusted , but thanks to companies like Cloudflare, now even the most benign , well meaning attempt to GET a website is met with a brick wall
I don't think it's fair to blame Cloudflare for that. That's looking at a pool of blood and not what caused it: the bots/traffic which predate LLMs. And Cloudflare is working to fix it with the PrivacyPass standard (which Apple joined).
Each website is freely opting-into it. No one was forced. Why not ask yourself why that is?
do you think that every well-meaning GET request should be treated the same way as a distributed attack ? The latter is the reason why people use CF not the former.
The line can be extremely blurry (that's putting it mildly), and "the latter" is not the only reason people use CF (actually, I wouldn't be surprised at all if it wasn't even the biggest reason).
The reason people use Cloudflare is because they provide free CDN, and we have at least 10 years of content marketing out there telling aspiring bloggers that, if they use a CDN in front of their website, their shitty WordPress website hosted on a shady shared hosting will become fast.
I don't think it's fair to blame Cloudflare for that. That's looking at a pool of blood and not what caused it: the bots/traffic which predate LLMs. And Cloudflare is working to fix it with the PrivacyPass standard (which Apple joined).
Each website is freely opting-into it. No one was forced. Why not ask yourself why that is?