Cloudflare's infrastructure dominance creates collateral damage

Two separate threads this week illustrated the downside of Cloudflare being the backbone of European web infrastructure. In Spain, La Liga's court-ordered Cloudflare blocks during football matches took down Docker Hub pulls as collateral damage. Separately, a data point surfaced that nearly 9 in 10 European companies using a CDN use Cloudflare specifically.

The concentration risk is real. When Cloudflare goes down, gets blocked, or gets legally compelled to act, it doesn't affect one website, it affects the operational backbone of a continent's internet. The Spain-Docker issue is almost comic: a football rights dispute broke developer infrastructure.

Discussions in both threads pointed to Bunny.net as a viable alternative with growing feature coverage, but switching costs and network effects keep most operators on Cloudflare. The recaptcha thread, where Firefox and Safari users in private mode get trapped in infinite loops on sites using Cloudflare's bot detection, adds another dimension: Cloudflare's security tools are increasingly punishing legitimate users.