I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole.
As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith. I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole.
This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
When VC money is flowing, you see things that look like (or even can be) altruism - but when the belts tighten and waste is eliminated these endeavors need to align with the company's goals.
Therefore, look for what Cloudflare is "buying" in this transaction. I suggest they probably want the PR win as it distracts from their objective of locking down the web, and it's worth the expenditure to them.
> This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
You can't even do that honestly. Look at Boeing. It got taken over by know-nothing managers that followed that religion of shareholder value, and what did it do? Destroy shareholder value!
I think we should instead say "we can't rely on any institution to be stable over time". That's a much more sane statement imo.
For-profit institutions will almost always act in the interest of profit for the people who have an ownership stake and a claim to the prophet stream. That's definitionally why they exist, and we have enough evidence from the history of everything ever to assume that they will for the most part act that way.
You are saying something different. You are pointing out that the people making decisions aren't necessarily good at making those decisions. Or maybe the incentive structure is set up such that the people making the decisions do not share the goal of profit with the company, and so decide according to what's best for them, which might or might not be what's best for the profit objective.
The instability of institutions in general is yet a third characteristic.
> For-profit institutions will almost always act in the interest of profit for the people who have an ownership stake and a claim to the [profit] stream.
But they won't. This statement is a declaration of faith/religion, not a statement of fact. It's a common belief, but that doesn't make it true.
It's a matter of historical fact. When has this not been the case. Can you think of any serious examples? Everyone everywhere all the time is just responding to the incentives in their environment. "Make a lot of money" is a very very powerful incentive.
There are exceptions all over the place where businesses don't act like robber barons, sure. Take for example Market Basket up here in New England, where the CEO for years and years resisted raising prices and tried to treat workers well, in the interest of maintaining a long-term positive image and being a sustainable element of the region's economy. But guess what: he was just forced out for not being greedy enough. Lots of people seem to be expecting a private equity takeover soon.
The actual metric management maximizes management remuneration, which is dependent on short-term shareholder value.
Startups nominally care more about the long view, as they need to convince investors that they high long-term value and have to act accordingly. As companies grow from VC-funded, to fast-growing public, then to well-established public company, the culture shifts to match dominant shareholder expectations.
> you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
I would like to understand where this breaks down. Would a for-profit individual be more reliable? Would a non-profit? At which point does quality deteriorate?
I think Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) are a way to try and solve that problem.
I recently switched to Kagi and their Orion browser, and that's when I learned about PBCs.
A PBC legally takes a triple mandate, the first is just as any for-profit corp, to maximize shareholder value, the second is to the benefit of the stakeholders, and the last can be anything they write down when they register as a PBC. The Delaware law says:
> The board of directors shall manage or direct the business and affairs of the public benefit corporation in a manner that balances the stockholders’ pecuniary interests, the best interests of those materially affected by the corporation’s conduct, and the specific public benefit or public benefits identified in its certificate of incorporation.
If they fail at any of these mandates, you can sue them.
That means they are still for-profit, but also can't decide to favor profit over their other mandate or change their mind. Their other mandate being stakeholders interests, like users, as well as the explicitly stated benefit. For Kagi, that benefit is:
> Kagi is committed to creating a more human-centric and sustainable web that benefits individuals, communities, and society as a whole, with a transparent business model that aligns the incentives of everyone involved.
Now it's not all roses, Anthropic I learned is another PBC. Their benefit is:
> the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity
Which is quite vague, and can be taken in many directions.
But overall, it's much better than normal corporations, because here they are legally obligated to care about stockholder, stakeholder, and some additionally specific "public benefit".
where are you getting this? PBC has no actual legal aspect to it at all - its all self reporting and self adherence. PBC is more marketing/signalling than legal requirements
From my interpretation (which I think would match that of an attorney at the PBC):
1) Legally Enforceable: periodic self reporting of public benefit related activities
2) Not legally enforceable: the detailed scope and actual delivery/implementation of said benefits. Third party auditing
i.e. if you try going and suing OpenAI, Anthropic etc. on their stated public benefit contradicting the severe impact datacenters are having to water/electricity in some areas, im quite certain that you would lose.
> This is quite simple and history bears it out: you can't rely on a for-profit corporation to operate in any other manner than optimizing shareholder value.
This is like saying that history bears out that you can't rely on governments to do anything but prepare for war and then send you out to die in one.
No they are not. DPT is just about "democratic" government having conflicts with each other. They find it difficult because they are economically intertwined. They have no such problem preying on other countries, often in cooperation.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith.
I'm already bombarded with cloudflare captchas when using Firefox, especially on Linux. Residential IP address. I'm suspicious of everything cloudflare is doing right now.
I recently saw https://neal.fun/not-a-robot/ on the front-page but then I gave up as that's my daily reality with cloudflare and friends already. I use 3 browsers on linux with Thai IP address because at least one of them is always blocked by cloudflare. Especially if I go work on public wifi I often actually have to hotspot myself to 4g to even get stuff to load.
I've started taking more extreme stance these days of ctrl+w instantly and maybe email the admins if I'm particularly angry that I will not buy whatever they're selling because I simply can't be bothered with their spyware blocking me. Maybe some day people will wisen up on the damage cloudflare is doing to their business.
Anecdotally, I'm not. I always use Firefox (or Zen) and get almost no Captchas. Neither at home, nor at work. Not on Windows, not on Linux, not on macOS.
I'm not going to say that Cloadflare isn't doing anything fishy, but if they are, it's probably more complicated.
You're bombarded with Cloudflare captchas because bots are heavily scraping the websites you're browsing and they are struggling to stay online by putting in place heavy-handed bot-fighting tactics. Without Cloudflare, you wouldn't have the website you're browsing.
Unless they're actually dropping the connections with a RST, I wonder how much bots repeatedly hammering at their CAPTCHA pages (which is actually relatively large in comparison to many static sites) costs them, vs. just serving the actual content which could actually be smaller.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith.
> I wish more companies were like Cloudflare actually - trying to balance the need of revenues while trying to do good for internet and open source as a whole.
> As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.
I think general distrust with any major company these days is warranted, especially one with so much control over the internet. But I agree with your points, too.
This should be relevant to the Cloudflare discussion, posted today:
Assuming bad faith in the case of Cloudflare specifically? Know first that the CIA once ran a front company for decades that was meant to be a trusted source for cryptographic hardware for use by embassies and the like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
If the CIA wanted to MITM all web traffic, and why wouldn't they, a company like Cloudflare is probably exactly how they'd do it.
They're a gatekeeper to a large chunk of Internet already. If they decide that your IP range stinks? Hope you enjoy your ration of 22 captcha pages a day!
Now, they're making some very transparent moves to leverage what they have to get even more control. And once they get even more control? It's not an "if" they start choking you with it to get more revenue. It's a "when".
People used to say "I wish more companies were like Google". They don't say that anymore.
And what are the rules? Don’t use AI to steal training content across the internet, spread nuclear grade spam and propaganda at scale, hack servers with automated agents? Seems fine.
the end game will be ai training bots will have to be:
1) like 1 cent or fraction of cent to get access to page
2) scrawlers will just cache this data on their server or just train on it so will pay just once
3) small content creators will get just make like few dollars our of it
4) CF will get some 10-30% cut from their content semaphore.
5) in the end you small content creator trading their whole content for few dollars but because CF has mass of scale they will make multi millions or more.
It's pretty easy, these are private companies and not democratic institutions that build consensus within their communities. It is better to assume bad faith upon corporate actors because they don't typically advocate for things that help humanity, mostly only themselves.
> I don't understand why we always assume bad faith
Because they all seem to eventually "screw" us. Google seemed (and maybe actually was) altruistic at some point, and even Apple seemed to be (when the only way they could make money was to do right by the users).
Cloudflare is running the largest and longest denial of service attacks in the history of the internet by acting as arbitrary gatekeeper to important government sites like congress.gov. I haven't been able to load it in years.
Nope. It's because the cloudflare captchas require a bleeding edge browser. If one uses a modern commercial browser it works and you've never even presented with a captcha. But in both cases I am tunneling to a VPS to avoid Comcast/Xfinity's MITM injections of javascript into pages and that adds some oddness to my connections. Comcast has a monopoly on high speed internet in my town and I cannot even get DSL or I'd switch.
Lacking lived experience re: discrimination is something that's pretty common. I hate to compare my entirely optional 'software veganism' struggles with real discrmination issues, but just because you don't experience discrimination doesn't mean it doesn't happen. I go to online stores, government services, even places of recreation and I get denied service because I have to tunnel to avoid my ISP's unethical practices and I don't use a cloudflare approved browser. It feels bad.
I know Firefox works fine, even if you use a decent tunnel, but if that is too commercial and bleeding edge perhaps the Ladybird project is actually a solution if it gets up speed?
Well, you see, once a Cloudflare site violated the TOS so badly that they had to get their C-levels involved to decide if the TOS violation was bad enough to not want them on their platform. That one site was kicked off and this site *HOWLED* at the terrible giant internet company doing a censorship and they have never been forgiven.
(The site that was "deplatformed" was fine and still exists, much to the chagrin of the minorities it directs hate towards and the people literally stalked there.)
There is no way you didn't write this comment while laughing out loud.
For-profit companies care about profits for their shareholders, that's it. Heck, even non-profit often tend to value more profit than their integrity or cause but that's a topic for another day.
I wish this wasn't the case but even good-willed individuals at the helm of for-profits are forced to pursue profit and avoid anything clearly leading to losses, else they are sacked.
It is baffling and concerning that anyone disagrees with you. The blind faith of so many that companies will magically and selflessly act in the best interest of anyone but their shareholders is, perhaps, the most damaging social ill we face (exacerbated by Citizens United).
You're severely misinformed and parotting misinformed meme interpretations of fiduciary duty.
Integrity and a healthy market align with fiduciary duty as long as one can make the argument that it's in the long term interest of the company. It's really, really difficult to find examples of a person being held liable for not upholding their fiduciary duty because what can be argued as good for the long term success of the company involves a lot of prognostication.
Fiduciary duty is there to prevent things like a CEO choosing to oberpay his cousin's company that has no history in the market for things they've never done before when there is an obviously better option available.
Companies that act poorly, as you describe, do so out of their own desire, not because they are forced to by any sort of duty.
Since you seem so well-informed I would love any example of good-will and strictly not-for-profit activities done directly by a large corporation with shareholders which weren't done have other reasons.
Examples of things which don't count:
- Supporting an open source competitor to avoid getting hammered by antitrust
- Giving money to a foundation (which they may or might not own) for greenwashing
- Giving money to a foundation ran by a friend/family member
- Doing an activity to try to fix an evil thing they did before and backfired
- Doing something good for obvious PR reason (e.g. By being heavily advertised) but then do something even worse in the same area later on
I'm genuinely interested in a healthy conversation about this. But I honestly cannot think of anything which either is generally free for the company or that will help them getting (or not losing) more money. Happy to be wrong.
> Giving money to a foundation (which they may or might not own) for greenwashing
What evidence would be required for you to believe that a donation to an environmental cause wasn't greenwashing?
Your list of exceptions seems fairly obviously aimed at making the task impossible because it's all based on interpretation of motives. You're essentially discounting all actions that have positive societal effects as long as doing so is motivated by money which is counter to the point I was making.
Giving money away to charity, by the meme interpretation of fiduciary duty, would be illegal. Instead, companies do it all the time because it makes them look better which might improve their business outlook in the future. That satisfies fiduciary dury despite it being a red line in the accounting books.
Wouldn't you like to live in a world where people care enough about doing good things that they'd prefer to patronize companies that do good things? That seems like an incredibly positive effect, regardless of the business' motives.
Those of us who get blocked from access services (government, commercial, personal) by cloudflare nearly every day have the lived experience to really understand the issue and the company. Most are blissfully unaware of their lack of experience. If you stick to corporate browsers you'd never know. It's not your fault, but maybe reflect on this lack of experience before commenting with so much confidence.
Cloudflare is domiciled in the USA, where shareholder supremacy has been part of US corporate law going all the way back to Dodge v Ford Motor Co. in 1919.
Now, it's in Cali, where it's not as strong a statement as in some other states, but it's still got a lot of precedent behind it.
Hi, we assume bad faith because we have seen again and again that corporate humans can be expected in ways that would at best be described as sociopathic when referring to a real flesh and blood human.
As a normal user with a few sites, I'm glad they provide what they provide to block bots, attacks and everything AI.