Cloudflare starts blocking pirate sites for UK users

- The Silent Generation, in charge at the time, had no idea what was this Internet thing about.

- The US Intelligence community understood it was a powerful tool to operate abroad.

- Nobody dared derailing the only engine of growth and progress in many economies

It obviously got out of control and is very abnormal in fact if you consider how power really works.

As of today, as a user of a reputable VPN, I am blocked from a lot essential websites or have to prove I am an human every 5 minutes, it sucks.

Anyway we are one major cyber disaster away for our the state to switch from a blacklist to whitelist paradigm. A safer and better Internet for everyone.

We will probably still have ways to access the "Free" Internet. It is gonna be fun, slower and might get you in serious troubles.

I have to do that using corporate and residential US networks, simply because I use Firefox.

As great as Cloudflares services might be to each individual user, the centralization of infrastructure, and by extension the centralization of power, doesn’t seem to be worth it at a macro level. The tragedy of the commons strikes again.

Centralized power, centralized censorship.

At approximately the same time, social networks became less social and more propaganda feeds.... so it went from a feed of content made by your friends for other friends (from complaints in status messages to photos of their plates) and moved to whatever crap they try to serve you now,...

Can't they at least set a first-party cookie to avoid repeated captchas per site, given that they're terminating HTTP?

But as soon as you had ISPs started, centralization came. Now, most countries will have at most 5 major ISPs, and in reality geographical availability within countries make 1 or 2 available.

Then, originally people had their own websites (I was there!) in their own servers. But Geocities started the centralization trend. And then CDNs, and then MySpace/Facebook and all that.

The only way we are going to get the "freedom" network as it was before is through mesh-networks or similar technologies. Which maybe so far are very slow and cumbersome, but they will have to evolve. I know it is not very fashionable here in HN, but the only see that capable of happening is implementing some kind of "incentive mechanism" that incenvitives people to let data pass through their node in the mesh network; aaaand cryptocurrencies offer an possible solution for that.

The real problem with the internet, as I see it, is centralization. This is a product of monopoly, which is the core feature of copyright. A truly better internet would replace the authoritative structure of copyright with a truly decentralized model.

As far as I can tell, the only hard problem left in decentralized networking is moderation. No one wants to browse an unmoderated internet. The problem is that moderation is structured as an authoritative hierarchy, so it's not compatible with true decentralization.

I propose we replace moderation with curation. Every user can intentionally choose the subset of internet they want to interact with, defined by attestations from other users, all backed with a web of trust. This way everyone is the highest authority, and users can help each other avoid content they are disinterested in.

I remember around 2010 there were cities with several small new ISPs providing fast home and mobile Internet for cheap and with very good coverage. Infrastructure costs were probably very low. Order of magnitude I guess compared to 4G, cable or fiber.

You could find phones supporting it (HTC was one of the maker) and it seemed to be the perfect solution for most users. I am not sure if those small ISPs already had a roaming system in place but it would have made a lot of sense.

Anyway, when Intel finally gave up I thought there are probably strong forces wanting to keep access to the Internet in a few hands, expensive and centralised.

The Internet is just a commercialised ARPANet. ARPANet was designed to survive bombs taking out a fair percentage of it's nodes. The Internet still has that robust resistance to damage. You can see it in action when anchors cut ocean cables - barely anyone notices. And as the old saying goes, the internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it.

However, the commercial enterprises built on top of the internet love centralisation. CloudFlare is an interesting case in point. They have been champions of an uncensored internet for as long as I can remember, which is one of the reasons they grew to their current size. That growth was always going to compromise that core principle, because once a significant amount of traffic passed through them they would become an attractive target for groups wanting to inflict their views of what's proper viewing for the rest of the world.

But while CloudFlare can't exist without the internet, the internet will continue on without CloudFlare. So while the self appointed gatekeepers have indeed blocked the large hole in the sponge that is CloudFlare, underneath the sponge is still a sponge. Information people find interesting will just take other routes.

Or to put it another way, if they think they have stopped or even appreciably slowed down teenage boys from accessing porn, they are kidding themselves.

Having a one WiMAX enabled smartphones was the cherry on top and probably more of a long term goal. The only one I remember was the HTC Evo 4G [0] (the first 4G enabled smartphone released in the US, and by 4G they meant WiMAX, not LTE).

My guess is there was for sure a big battle between Intel, major phone manufacturers, telcos, infra providers and various patents holders.

There was probably a chicken and egg dilemma for mobile phone manufacturer since they had to wait for the network to grow before risking launching their WiMAX phone but having a WiMAX enabled phone would make WiMAX at home really attractive.

My guess is also that since people usually get their phone from their telco, phone manufacturer had to be careful not to go against their interests. And since most telco wanted LTE, WiMAX couldn't take off.

But there might be more to this story, including the fact Intel was also trying to get in the phone SOC market at this time.

- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Evo_4G

I find this hard to believe. In New Zealand, the tiny country I live in, I can name off the top of my head at least 10 ISPs. You're telling me most countries, which on average are far bigger than mine, have fewer? I don't believe it. Another made-up statistic.

Not at all. Today there are hundreds of WISPs based on Wi-Fi(ish) or proprietary FWA technology in the US alone.