Explain to me like I’m a 5 year old who just learned what an internet is how CloudFlare can block traffick to websites that dont sign up for their services?
News from the UK shows that CloudFlare is now blocking a bunch of domains associated with peer to peer file sharing, but I dont understand why these domains wouldn’t just migrate away from CloudFlare services and that would fix the problem. Do the ISPs use CloudFlare to provide services between the user and the website hosts when the user requests a web page via the browser?
CloudFlare offers free/inexpensive application firewall, DDOS, and static web hosting services. A few years ago, they also added bot detection, and more recently AI scraping prevention, all for free. They say they can offer all this for free because they make most of their money from enterprises. They’re especially popular with open-source projects because those services are really useful for anyone putting up a public-facing site nowadays and having to pay for each of them would be too expensive.
Anyone can set up CloudFlare to be the first point of contact before the traffic is passed on to them. This means that if CloudFlare’s system decides something looks wrong, they can easily block that traffic flow. The way they do this is by having them manage your DNS records so traffic flows through their services first.
None of this is automatic. Someone has to explicitly configure their site to do this. In a federated service, anyone can set up their node to be handled by CF. If CF detects traffic problems and blocks a certain flow or port, it could affect sharing between all the other nodes in the federation.
If the traffic is deemed illegal and CF is notified by law enforcement, they can shut down peer-to-peer traffic going through their network.