Cloudflare's Centralization Risk? Fighting Censorship with Dissent
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Does relying on Cloudflare pose a centralization risk or censorship problem for decentralized platforms? This discussion delves into the potential pitfalls of using major infrastructure providers like Cloudflare, Amazon, and Fastly, especially for a pro-decentralization audience.
The conversation reveals how Cloudflare, used as intended, inherently offers anti-censorship benefits, with one speaker noting their own decentralized platform runs without issue. It also introduces 'Dissent,' a separate app for VP.net users that leverages blind-signed tokens to provide authenticated service without revealing user identity, ensuring robust privacy and censorship resistance.
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Transcript
Does relying on Cloudflare create a centralization problem because we of course have a decentralization audience. And what stops Cloudflare, Amazon, Fastly, and others from saying, nope, not on our infrastructure. Yeah, you know, that's absolutely a risk. Um, the first, the first thing that you're speaking of, just using Cloudflare, you know, we outlined that in our white paper, and that's definitely the first thing that needs to be addressed is having other, other providers available. Um, there is, of course, the risk that they could potentially block us. Um, the reason it's different than domain fronting is that we're using their service the way it's intended essentially. So it's not using any tricks or workarounds to make it work. So we're not technically violating their terms of service. And you know, right at the beginning of our white paper, we actually, you know, thank the CEO of Cloudflare for developing this type of infrastructure because it does already on its own, does allow parts of the internet to reach people that wouldn't ordinarily be able to reach it. So just on its own, Cloudflare is already in some ways anti-censorship tool, and we're just sort of taking that ...
