Kicking the can down the road
Dear readers, I ask you a question: do you know who controls you? Most will say the government, some of the funny ones will say a wife/girlfriend, others might say something like an addiction or money (an object or goal), but as far as the tech world is concerned, it really comes down to conglomerate entities, and there isn't really a way to get around it.
I had a fear some time ago about my google account arbitrarily getting banned because of reading a post about how the creator of the hit game Terraria had his google account deleted for no reason, and lost a ton of stuff like his steam library, all of his email, a ton of services like netflix and whatnot, and most importantly, a lot of his game development stuff like servers and licenses. Why was his account banned? Actually no reason. "This could happen to me!" So as a kneejerk reaction, I moved all of my email over to a zero-trust provider, in this case ProtonMail, and purchased a custom domain because it's cool.
So the big thought now is "alright, he moved email provider. It's done, end of story, finished." but wrong! See, I kinda hated proton mail because I didn't like their mobile app and because of the way the encryption works there isn't a way to view the email outside of the app (at least on mobile). So, I moved back to google. One big change occurred as a part of all of this, though, and that is that my new email is part of a custom domain that I pay for. All of my accounts are set up with that custom domain. Previous to this I had a single domain for my side business, Arizona Computer and that was (and still is, due to registration constraints and google being kinda sickly about who can have 'premimum domains') hosted on Google Domains. These new domains, however, are hosted with cloudflare. I chose cloudflare because they have an excellent record with kinda letting anyone use their platform, and their pricing model isn't necessarily built around selling data (because, as we know, businesses that have an obvious way they make money are more honest than business where you are the product). All of this coalesces into making a system where my email provider can ban my email account and I lose no access to any accounts because I can simply point my thenathe.me domain elsewhere and use that email.
Recently I was browsing r/selfhosted, a community of people on reddit that love running their own servers. I love this too, both because I love to tinker, I love the idea of having something uniquely my own, and also that all of this tinkering helps me stay up and current on my work as an IT professional. Anyway, as I was browsing this I thought "man, these people sure love hosting all of their own stuff and are usually very against M$, Google, Amazon/AWS, etc. Why do they love cloudflare so much?". This is strange to me because, for people that seemingly hate centralization, they love cloudflare and it is a backbone for like 50% or more of the internet. And after a little while of searching, I came up with the referenced post. To summarize two portions of what is said:
Different people do self hosting for different reasons and different levels of control. For a lot of people it's not at all about getting away from big corporate but about having a space you can learn about working in big corporate better (homelab) At a certain point getting a public facing IP address that has some level of high end network protection requires a big company. Whether it's OVH, Azure, AWS, Cloudflare... any solution that doesn't involve your ISP's IP being out in the wind and exposed to a DDoS attack will involve a large corporation.
So this first idea is "a big evil is necessary to keep yourself safe", very astute.
Cloudflare has, until something changes, protected countless individuals from attackers for basically nothing. I trust them more than I trust my isp. And if you aren’t your own isp then you’re just kicking the can down the line.
This argument is "cloudflare isn't that bad, and because their business model is more transparent than the other world controlling entities, I like this world controlling entity the best"
Basically I can turn off Cloudflare and my services would still work. My services don't have a strong dependency on Cloudflare so I don't find myself on a walled garden while I get some goodies like free caching to reduce my server load.
Because cloudflare isn't integral to my services, it isn't nearly as bad as services that are needed and integral.
It is impossible to be fully self-hosted unless you are running with an air-gap between you and the internet. The moment you connect to the internet you are by definition reliant on others. Your ISP, your phones data provider, and every other ISP whose equipment routes your traffic become participants in your network. Cloudflare is one of the participants who have both the scale and the toolset to assist in keeping as much control as possible in the hands of the self-hosting enthusiast. The hard core self-hosting crowd is far more reliant on those they reject than they will ever admit to themselves. The trick is to find a balance of control and usefulness.
Pretending that you can get by in the modern internet age without security and reliance on what is essentially one of the big players that provide security is foolhardy. Even today, anyone can host their own email server on their local network. It isn't hard to get that going. What is WILDLY difficult is staying safe, semi-anonymous, and secure while doing so. You'll get hacked faster than a nascar driver can say "left turn".
Finally,
You will always be subject to “big world-controlling” companies. Unless you are doing wiring yourself, getting a static IP from ICANN yourself, and building a processor from scratch, there will always be some “world-controlling company”. Even that IP address is within the control space of your ISP. The logic of the original statement falls flat however as even asking ICANN for an address would require you to go to some world controlling entity.
This is the biggest kicker to me. Even if you do say "fuck cloudflare, google, amazon, M$, and all the rest, I'm gonna strike out on my own!", you still need an ISP for an internet connection. Even if you surpass that and go directly to the ICANN to get your own top-level-IP, you are still going to a world controlling entity. And even if you don't consider a regulation agency a WCE, you still have to go to the massive datacenters to get 'recognized' as an ISP so people will "service" your IP address (yes, that is a real thing and is a huge barrier of entry to legitimate modern ISP startups). There simply is no way to get past a WCE. You just kick the can down the road.
And maybe that's alright, cause it always sounded kinda lonely living as a hermit atop the mountain.