Bandwidth is useful because it most directly corresponds to deployed physical hardware. If other providers have made that capital investment, taking customers away from Cloudflare is a matter of gradually rolling out features to meet their needs. Not trying to trivialize the effort, but it seems doable.

That’s not actually true. Compute cycles would be the best proxy for deployed hardware. Just delivering bits doesn’t actually take much hardware. (And not even sure why the amount of deployed hardware is a great metric.)

We specifically aren’t interested in pure bit delivery. It’s a commodity business that will have its margins squeezed to zero over time. We provide CDN services because caching is a useful tool in computer science when you want to deliver performance for other applications. If you measured our revenue per bit delivered, it would be far more attractive than any of the traditional CDN providers because we aren’t primarily selling bit delivery where they primarily are.