valid.

...but OTOH it's their customers who want all of that and pay to get that, because the alternative is worse.

rock and a hard place.

Right - do I want them getting some info from me, or do I want my IP address exposed?

Besides CloudFront, which still costs money, what other option is there for semi-privacy and caching for free?

bunny.net has some options

I will have to check them out I guess

As the old addage goes: If you're not paying for it, you're the product.

Lots of nuance, but generally: pay for things you use. Servers, engineers, and research and development are not free, so someone has to pay.

Lots of services don't even let me pay if I wanted to, so I am forced to be the product. (Donating typically does not un-productify myself).

Or I pay and am still the product. Just with less in-my-face ads.

> Or I pay and am still the product. Just with less in-my-face ads.

Yes, this is enshittification. You pay for Amazon something or other, and they STILL show you ads. Horrible.

fwiw, I have been convinced to look at other options

Cloud front is pretty much free for your first TB. Fastly has a free plan.

Though why should it be for free?

Multiple people have brought that up. I pay for everything else, why not one more.

Although bunny.net won't take ANY of my credit or debit cards

I want to know if there is a way to design an alternative that isn't controlled by a single entity which allows gatekeeping.

You can add another one as a result of this article: The data you need to train AI and the data you need to build a search engine are the same data. So now they're inhibiting every new search engine that wants to compete with Google.

they always had. this post is about turning the false positives "up to 11" with impunity