I can no longer access any website that's "protected" by Cloudflare. As soon a website enables that stuff… "Shoot, another one bites the dust." I wonder if the website owners realise at all how many actual users they lose by this sort of "protection."

They sometimes have to comply with legal requests (which I understand), but at the same time they have a huge market share - which means that the internet is becoming less and less decentralized and more in their control. We've seen the effects of that in previous outages...

>I am extremely worried about how so many seem to have outsourced the control over who can access their websites to a company, with no second thoughts whatsoever.

I think the Web is on its last legs, anyway. Generative AI and LLM-instead-of-search has destroyed what little value remained.