They don't forbid it. They request you get permission first. No one seems to have bothered asking to find out if CF say no.

Benchmarking accurately is hard, so CF trying to make sure they're not going to be subject to a "report" by someone whose tests are garbage, or by a competitor who's benchmarking poorly to make their own offering look better isn't totally unreasonable. Ideally, as far as CF are concerned, they'd be so far ahead of the competition it wouldn't matter, but presumably that wasn't the case when the ToS were written. The fact the CEO posted to say the clause is being removed means we can all freely test in future.

This is how things are supposed to work. Someone does something, someone else reacts, and the first person updates their position. Expecting everyone to get things perfectly correct on the first try is nonsense.

It would be nice for the first person to actually own it and not just say "I have no idea who put it into our TOS". Besides, it's either disingenuous or something is seriously broken in Cloudflare if their CEO is more attentive to HN comments than their own SMM people, as Fastly called that clause out on Twitter weeks ago.

Anti benchmark clauses usually prohibit publication. This wouldn’t exclude running two systems with your workload and documenting the results for internal use.

Except the CloudFlare ToS (posted as an image from the tweet thread above) says "perform or publish benchmark tests or analyses..."