The short answer is: A bit of both, really.

The longer answer is pretty detailed and would include all the positive things they have done as well as the negative things they have done and the unintended consequences of having so much of the internet "behind" Cloudlfare.

It's sadly not a cut-and-dry situation, they've definitely added some cool, positive stuff to the world. They've also created a mangled mess for a lot of people where they're blocked from accessing certain parts of the web because Cloudflare is throwing down a false-positive and thinks they're a "bad actor."

I would say it's up to individual interpretation if they're doing more "breaking" or more "fixing." For some, far more is broken than fixed, and for others, it's the opposite.

I fall in the "more is fixed than broken" camp, but the "more is broken than fixed" camp have plenty of evidence to support their assertions. I am not really willing to ignore the downsides just because they don't affect me personally.

Hard to answer your question because it's a mixed bag.

As tech gets cheaper, it gets easier and easier to do malicious things.

On the small scale: I used to host my tech blog on a rinky dink raspberry pi.

I was getting hundreds of funny bot visits a hour, as they try to pen test and find any vulnerabilities. And that was after I set up some tools to block weird IPs. Two years ago, I was getting thousands, and the numbers kept growing. It didn't hit a point where user experience was taking a hit, but at some point it will.

I could get a beefier system (more expensive), or I can just sign up for cloudflare. And now the management of that layer is handled by Cloudflare, so I can focus on coding.

Now to talk About the enterprise level: same thing but hundreds of times more. We were actually getting DDos. We originally didn't want to use Cloudflare, and instead use in-house solutions. But after a hefty trial and seeing our AWS expenses skyrocket, we swapped to Cloudflare.

Signed up, swapped over to Cloudflare, and instant uptake. We are also paying a fraction compared to our in-house solution.

It sounds like a freaking ad for cloudflare.

But one thing I don't like is Cloudflare can easily monopolize the internet. As we all switch, Cloudflare now has a lot of power to tell sites to fuck off if they don't like their content. Cloudflare hasn't yet. They keep up White Power websites and racist shit. But they have taken down calls of violence and online gambling.

If you have your day ruined by Cloudflare, I'm going to either assume you run a bot network, you're trying to do something incorrectly, or you are part of the dark web.

Essentially, their entire schtick is being a middleman. By sitting between the server you want to visit, they can do helpful things like DDOS protection, being a CDN (basically store website assets closer to you), managing HTTPS for you and providing access to your website over IPv6 even if your server doesn't have it.

By nature of that though, their position is quite sensitive since it has become a service that a good chunk of the Internet goes through. That causes concerns about centralization and pisses in a lot of people's cereals politically.

Cloudflair provides a lot of network services that are during levels of difficult to achieve.

They provide really great services at a free level but doing so there make you the product.

They can be used to let you host a reasonably secure website at your house behind your ISP firewall that won't let you host, with SSL that you don't have to maintain. They handled dynamic DNS and host names and honestly dozens of other things that are all useful.

Essentially morally they're like Google back in the early 2000s. Eventually they'll need more money and force us to pay or get out.

Mostly breaking it. They're centralizing stuff and nowadays lots of services depend on that single service provider. And the original idea of the internet was to make everyone equal and have some resilience against single points of failure. That's kind of detrimental to the whole idea.

Secondly, you unencrypt your traffic and send it to them plain so they can read everything. That may or may not be an issue for your use-case, but I like privacy and encryption and no third parties reading my messages.

And the question is: What do you need their service for? I understand that a tunnel is useful if you're behind a NAT. But the DDoS protection and attack prevention is mostly snake-oil for most people. It's often unnecessary, the free tier doesn't include any of the interesting stuff and it's questionable if most people get targeted by DDoS attacks anyways. And as I heard if it comes to that point, they will cease service to you anyways and want to see money ($240 to $2.400 per year.) So I don't see a good reason why you'd use Cloudflare in the first place. Unless you need a tunnel or subscribe to one of the more expensive plans. Otherwise it only has downsides.

I'm no expert either but as I understand it, the core service they are most well known for is protection against DDOS attacks. By routing traffic first to Cloudflare before sending it to the intended destination, it can try to check to make sure that whatever it's routing isn't coming from a botnet or whatever.

Yes

There's currently an AI war going on and this are just the waves.