One answer - It's much, much harder to build and operate a global network infrastructure that it might seem. It's also even harder to invent some sort of "killer feature" or other genuine innovation on the experience. You're likely not using Cloudflare simply for commoditized pipes alone, but for other features or designed experiences in their offering.

A second answer - there are a bunch of bottom-barrel commoditized pipe services. You likely haven't heard of them because they're so generic. They've existed before Cloudflare, and more will be created in the future https://www.citrix.com/products/citrix-intelligent-traffic-m...

Yes, why isn't the CDN a commodity?

CDNs are expensive to build, and often not very useful to customers until you've built out a large portion of it (actual hardware required, you can't just run it atop AWS). On top of this, much of the money is in Enterprise. So you've got to compete with Akamai, AWS, Fastly, Incapsula, Cloudflare, and several other notable ones to get any customers to speak of.

There are smaller CDNs out there. You can find them readily enough.

Yes, but for a customer it's trivial to swap out one CDN for another, isn't it?

Depending on how you integrated it and how deeply, it may be trivial. Certainly going from one DNS-based CDN to another can be pretty easy - a Cloudflare / CloudFront swap could be quick.

Which suggests to me that CDNs are already a commodity in some ways.