Cloudflare is becoming the default middleman, and people are noticing
Cloudflare launched a Web Search API that fronts providers like Exa. The top reactions: why not go direct to those providers, does Cloudflare need to be in the middle of everything, and do the underlying engines get captcha-free access to Cloudflare-protected sites. Commenters also noted that Brave Search is missing and Perplexity's absence was expected. In older threads that resurfaced, Docker pulls failed in Spain because La Liga's football blocks hit Cloudflare R2, and Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers got locked out by the 'verify you are human' wall.
The pattern: Cloudflare now sells the wall, the key to the wall, and the map of what's behind it. That is a strong position and an uncomfortable one. Each outage or block shows how many unrelated things share one chokepoint, from a Spanish football dispute to your Docker registry.
The counterpoint from the threads is practical. Plenty of builders don't want to run bare-metal servers on the open internet, and Cloudflare's bundle is simply convenient.
So what?
If your product depends on Cloudflare for delivery, protection, and now search, you have a single point of failure that third parties can trigger for reasons unrelated to you. Know your fallback for registries and CDNs, and if you sell data or search to agents, expect bot-access terms to become a real part of your business.