I would much rather have a company with a long but nearly clean track record, than a short and spotless one.

The difference is that when a company with a spotless record decides it's time to change their ways, it can be a pretty radical change (look at Reddit). But with cloudflare I know we're a long way from that.

It's kind of absurd how everyone expects spotless companies. I'd like to live in that world as well but the reality of this one is that such companies do not exist. Cloudflare gets criticism on both too much censorship and not enough. I don't envy them...

My last point was that DNS is supposed to be decentralized. With a properly decentralized system, censorship becomes very difficult. We shouldn't rely on someone like Cloudflare or Google to provide us with DNS services.

It's a decentralized service, but at the end of the day, your PC's going to check one address. If it's not Cloudflare/Google/Quad9/etc., you're just going to be checking against your ISP. It's pretty beneficial, especially in certain countries, to have alternatives to the ISP's DNS.

So what's your thinking here? Cloudflare shouldn't offer to be one of the many pillars of that properly decentralized system?

I don't believe we are going to suddenly flock to cloudflare to provide all dns ever. Between ISPs hardcoding or force-defaulting their own (awful) dns servers, and the amount of geeks and IT techs who have memorized 8.8.8.8, we're safe for a long time. And if I'm wrong on that, that wouldn't speak highly of the "decentralized" nature of DNS, would it?