TL;DR: This post isn’t merely a rant after Cloudflare’s recent outages, but rather meant to serve as an after-thought: is Cloudflare ruining the entire concept of a distributed internet? Is it on a path to violate Net Neutrality?

Let’s analyse it a little bit.

What is it?

Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Gateway routes all internet traffic from your devices such as your laptop, via Clouldflare’s internet backbone. Most likely, your personal device wouldn’t be connected to the zero trust Gateway, since it’s almost always deployed by enterprise companies.

What’s wrong with it?

The internet is de-centralised – no single authority can take it down, nor can control traffic across it. In its literal sense, “internet” means interconnected networks. This means that you’re reading this post through a bunch of networks that eventually connect to the host where this blog is hosted, in Amsterdam via Digital Ocean. The source of your connection could be anything – from a 5G capable device, a wired network connection being shared in a building, your ISP, etc. The list goes on an on.

However, Cloudflare Zero Trust Gateway routes ALL your traffic through a bunch of proxies that Cloudflare exclusively controls:

And now we get to the real problem: when Cloudflare deploys a buggy version of their software, to the end user, that is to you, it appears as if the entire internet is down. You can’t get work done, nor can you do anything productive with that €3000 MacBook you’ve just bought. Surprisingly, this happens more often than not, especially in recent times.

In the future, if Cloudflare Zero Trust Gateway captures any significant market share (hopefully unlikely), they can suddenly start to make decisions that violate Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality

If you’ve never watched John Oliver’s take on Net Neutrality, watch it here. ISPs have done such things in the past, and have managed to get away with it, albeit far fewer of those severely offending ISPs exist today (if somebody finds a valuable source for or against this, please post it in the comments). Of course, the giants still continue to live on.

Final Notes

In order to preserve Net Neutrality, the openness of the internet, no single company should own a significant chunk of the internet traffic. If your company is pushing for Cloudflare Zero Trust Gateway, push your IT administrator to read this post, and help point them in the right direction.