Cloudflare and the pipes are where internet control fights happen

A court sided with the EFF that Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility, leaving platforms to block all VPN traffic nationwide or leave Utah. Cloudflare launched an OHTTP gateway for privacy, and commenters immediately noted that fingerprinting and JavaScript make true anonymity hard, and that bad actors will use it more skillfully than ordinary users. Older threads in the same batch show the same dynamic: Docker pulls failing in Spain because La Liga's football blocks hit Cloudflare R2, and Cloudflare challenges locking out Pale Moon and other niche browsers.

The pattern: a handful of providers carry so much traffic that any rights holder or government can cause collateral damage by targeting them. One commenter said people underrate the danger to the open web of traffic running through a few providers. A reply to the VPN thread asked whether 'the internet routes around censorship' is still true or just a slogan, pointing to Iran and China.

The counterpoint from the Utah thread is that VPN exit relays are enumerable, so blocking them is technically possible. The court's ruling is about the cost and reliability of doing it.