The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

This is sort of like how email is based on Internet standards but a large percentage of email users use Gmail. The Internet standards Cloudflare is promoting are open, but Cloudflare has a lot of power due to having so many customers.

(What are some good alternatives to Cloudflare?)

Another way the situation is similar: email delivery is often unreliable and hard to implement due to spam filters. A similar thing seems to be happening to the web.

It is a big problem. There is no good alternative to Cloudflare as a free CDN. They put servers all over the world and they are giving them away for free. And making their money on premium serverless services.

Not to mention the big cloud providers are unhinged with their egress pricing.

> Not to mention the big cloud providers are unhinged with their egress pricing.

I always wonder why this status quo persisted even after Cloudflare. Their pricing is indeed so unhinged, that they're not even in consideration for me for things where egress is a variable.

Why is egress seemingly free for Cloudflare or Hetzner but feels like they launch spaceships at AWS and GCP every time you send a data packet to the outside world?