The problems where services are consolidated into larger companies is twofold. Firstly It hinders innovation and competition. Take Youtube for example, they may be profiting now but estimates are they made no profits for more than a decade. How does one offer a service to compete against that especially in this case where Youtube is owned by the same company with the worlds largest ad network? Short term the consumer may see benefits, e.g. free video services. Going forward not so much because Youtube now has stranglehold on that service.
The first point leads to second point. When so many services and the infrastructure behind it is controlled by small handful of companies they can effectively control what content is available. For example a service like Cloudflare which offers DDOS protection or Google which offers similar services free of charge to non profits, media outlets etc. Most websites, in particular smaller ones without many resources can easily be taken out with DDOS if they are not sitting behind a service like Cloudflare.
A few years back Cloudflare dropped services for one site over particular set of circumstances, the site was insinuating CF was backing their beliefs. While the sites content would be offensive to most of the population including myself it's also my belief they have right to offer their opinions no matter how vile they may be. Cloudflare as a company has the same policy and will take on any customer. The trouble starts when there is no company that will do that. When your options are limited to a handful of companies they can dictate what content or services are available to you online simply because there is no other outlet for it.
These are privately held companies and generally I would find telling a company who they can and cannot do business with abhorrent. That changes when services can be monopolized.
I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous.
- Excerpt of Internal Email from Cloudflare CEO
Follow up Blog post:
https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-term ... y-stormer/
In a not-so-distant future, if we're not there already, it may be that if you're going to put content on the Internet you'll need to use a company with a giant network like Cloudflare, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, or Alibaba.
For context, Cloudflare currently handles around 10% of Internet requests.
Without a clear framework as a guide for content regulation, a small number of companies will largely determine what can and cannot be online.
“Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I have found several thousand things that won’t work.”
Attributed - Thomas Edison