Part of the reason I don't like Cloudflare. Their "black hole the entire country" function is a function no company should provide.

On the contrary, if you don’t have business in a country and they just spam you or try to hack you why not block the whole IP range. China, India, Russia, Subsaharan Africa, SEA

so as a traveler, i can't access important sites in my home country because i happen to be in a different country that you decided to block?

you don't need cloudflare for that.

Companies should have that option if they choose, to apply to themselves at will.

Why not? There’s no right to force everyone on the internet to interact with everyone else.

> Their "black hole the entire country" function is a function no company should provide.

If I can have that feature with an on-prem firewall or load balancer, why can't I ask the in-cloud equivalent to also have it?

They block traffic reaching your website, not the other way around. For a poor, nitpickable analogy: they keep the bad guys out of your home, but they don't want to take away homes from the bad guys.

We all know the definition of "bad guy" shifts every four years or less

I get what you're saying (they're affording access to info, not access for people) but you can't have one without the other.

With your analogy, they aim to keep the "bad guys" out of all homes, which is the same thing as saying those guys can't have homes. Also the "bad guys" group you're referring to includes, like, my cousin Jake because he accidentally crashed his pushbike into a car once when he was 6, but doesn't include Adolf Hitler for some reason.

I'm glad I had the foresight to categorize my analogy as "nitpickable," otherwise I'd feel the need to defend it.

You're confusing censorship with moderation.

Moderation is when you block information from me, because I don't want to see that information.

Censorship is when you block information from me, because you don't want me to see that information.

Cloudflare is the former. Or at least, that's what they want to do. Or say that they want to do. If you let someone or something do moderation on your behalf, there's always a good deal of trust involved, that they're not manipulating you by also blocking information you would have wanted to see. Moderation is not a trivial matter. But it's also not censorship.