Conflicting services with Cloudflare?
Cloudflare is an internet company that sits between the user and a website. Every request and every response passes through Cloudflare.
It provides:
- Faster websites through caching and CDN
- Protection against attacks like DDoS
- Filtering of bots and suspicious traffic
A large part of the internet runs through Cloudflare. This gives it a lot of influence over what does and does not get through.
A while ago we already wrote about the dependency after a worldwide outage. One single party with impact on a large part of the internet.
That was the risk back then. Today a new layer is added.
Cloudflare has recently started offering tools that allow data to be retrieved, enabling you to use the web as a data source.
And that creates tension.
Because at the same time, Cloudflare is precisely one of the most important parties that blocks bots, scrapers, and automated traffic. On top of that, it is now going to deliver bot/scraper services itself.
They state that they will not deliver data from websites that are protected by Cloudflare, but that actually makes it an even stranger service. Because it is not complete.
What do you think?