Alternatively, you use the cloudflare money to sue the monopoly to decouple search and all other products, since blocking the AI trawlers shouldn't have any measurable impact in search rankings

I mean, with a company as large as cloudflare. I think they could /easily/ strong-arm this move by making blocking google crawlers a default setting on websites. The amount of traffic drop alone from that would make google think twice about the whole ordeal. And people who care about the google search indexers can turn them on again which will allow indexing again. but a default block would cause a lot of disruption google side and many people I don't think would go in and fix the setting till later on down the road.

I mean, with a company as large as cloudflare. I think they could /easily/ strong-arm this move by making blocking google crawlers a default setting on websites. The amount of traffic drop alone from that would make google think twice about the whole ordeal. And people who care about the google search indexers can turn them on again which will allow indexing again. but a default block would cause a lot of disruption google side and many people I don't think would go in and fix the setting till later on down the road.

There seems to be a line, so far as I can tell. If everything you need sits on the free tier, they're really good (well tbh their R2 storage is reasonably priced too). But once you stray into needing a paid tier, it apparently (I'm not there) quickly gets expensive as you're lured into every higher tiers.

But yes, in general I don't mind cloudflare so much and do use their free (and R2 paid) services.

If I had to choose my favourite corporation, it would be Cloudflare. They at least do something good.

You may want to read: https://robindev.substack.com/p/cloudflare-took-down-our-website

I still think they are good. Isolated incidents like this are going to happen when you are doing business at such scales.

This did not sound like an isolated incident at all. You don't get sales responding to a legal/engineering issue by accident. It may have been unintended by leadership, if they put too much pressure on sales not realizing how it was corrupting the company, or the leadership may have tacitly approved of this. Hard to tell.

Are there reports from others about similar things?