There is a disconnect here: I've read so many technical articles from cloudflare about neat problems they solve while at the same time they just boldly say fuck you to net neutrality and aggressively try to get people on board with the tracking internet that their corporate partners desire so strongly. I get the sense these aren't the same groups of people at the company itself.
I've been browsing anonymously with tor and other services for about five years now and the web just gets more and more hostile every day. So many pages, apps, services, etc just flat out don't work anymore even if you solely have a VPN running.
Not to throw cloudflare under the bus, Google and Apple have have created way more issues for me with their hostility to anyone who evades tracking.
That's not what "net neutrality" means: Cloudflare is a service the site operators choose to pay for.
An example of actually saying fuck you to net neutrality would be your ISP announcing that access to "premium web sites" will be slowed to 10kb/s unless you pay an additional fee.
Eh, I really doubt that it's designed to punish people who aren't tracking. Tracking makes users much more valuable, but the average legitimate user who isn't being tracked is still probably net positive value, so it wouldn't make sense to just block them outright.
I think the problem is that a very high percentage of malicious behavior online comes from Tor, certain IP ranges, VPNs, scrapers that don't run Javascript, etc, etc. You can't get rid of all of those malicious actors, but you can probably block the vast majority of them by taking the actions you're complaining about here, and I suspect that it doesn't actually cost you that much. You get some cranky nerds and some legit users who are using Tor and VPNs who won't be able to use your site, but they're a tiny minority.
Cranky nerd here. I've tried to use Tor to access websites for legitimate purposes and found much of the web has become unusable recently.
But perhaps you need a motivating example, since you don't think there's any value in supporting Tor! I'll give you some.
- Security researcher wishes to contact an organization about a security hole in their site or product, but doesn't know if they'll be sued, so they want to protect their identity. (source: this is me; have met other people doing this)
- Pedophile (who doesn't want to be one) seeking therapy options that don't involve a high risk of being incarcerated or killed. (source: read an article about this)
- Teenager in a repressive environment trying to access LGBTQ resources; parents have a netfilter on, or maybe have snoopware on the router. (source: several acquaintances)
- Chinese citizen trying to find a different view of history (source: pretty freaking common, although Great Firewall makes it tricky)
These are people who don't have other, good options. And you'll need to be able to withstand the sizeable quantities of malicious traffic that don't come through Tor, so it's not like you really win anything. It's worth not blocking Tor.
But perhaps you need a motivating example, since you don't think there's any value in supporting Tor!
I never said that.
I do think that the onus is on you to explain to whatever company you're railing against here why its in their best interest to welcome Tor traffic, particularly if it will make them more vulnerable. And sorry, to me you're not doing a good job of making that case. These examples seem like edge cases for the vast majority of websites. If I was blocking Tor (I'm not), I wouldn't reconsider my position from these scenarios. The cost is simply too high for too little benefit to too few people, probably none of which are my target audience.
And just to be clear, I truly understand the value of Tor and similar projects, and I hope we get more of them and they're more widely supported. But they come with real downsides too, so it's not surprising to me that many businesses and governments aren't going to out of their way to support them. That's the price you pay.
You need to provide fiscal value or convince the operations team of legitimate companies to not treat Tor as a bad apple. It may not be right but money is the only motivating example that matters to companies.
I've been browsing anonymously with tor and other services for about five years now and the web just gets more and more hostile every day. So many pages, apps, services, etc just flat out don't work anymore even if you solely have a VPN running.
Not to throw cloudflare under the bus, Google and Apple have have created way more issues for me with their hostility to anyone who evades tracking.