The question is: Can we do better? A natural monopoly is a good thing. It just means that the natural monopoly needs to build its own redundancy. Cloudflare total failure isn't common.
I wouldn't classify a natural monopoly as a good thing. It mostly signifies high barriers to entry for competitors and a market that's more susceptible to failure, as seen here.
I guess but there's not really a shortage of commercial CDNs. A market with lots of competitors but a clear winner says more about consumer preference and network (ha!) effects than it does about Cloudflare's moat.
I think for the sake of a diverse community and economy, monopolies should be difficult to achieve even naturally.
But for this specific example, a robust technical redundancy doesn't stop CloudFlare from going out of business. A technology company going out of business is pretty much the norm. Incumbents are a relatively new phenomenon for technology (sans some key exceptions), and I don't think CloudFlare is an incumbent. They are an accessory, and your business would probably run without them.
Cloudflare isn't a monopoly. Cloudflare doesn't even have a particularly strong moat when compared to Fastly or Akamai. Cloudflare doesn't even have any network effects.
I must disagree, and wish I had more data on how many sites host with cloudflare because it's free.
I just checked, fastly is $50 per month, and Akamai doesn't list pricing so let's assume it's more.
Cloudflare has had network affects from integration with wordpress and cpanel too I believe for some time now.
without cloudflare your site can be taken offline by any random person willing to spend $20 for ddos sellers.
The free plan is a pretty big moat imho, especially if 'half the internet can fail..' - I doubt 10% of those sites would be using cloudflare if there was a monthly fee pushed on them.
Admittedly, my cloudflare usage is only about 30 sites, so my data point is small. The few hosting and design clients I have and their budget constraints are not indicative of 'half the internet' - but I don't believe fortune 500 and SV sites are either.
If you have a "monopoly" which is this case just means you're the market leader by a wide margin, but in theory this could mean near total control of a market but the reason you have this total control is because your customers choose to buy from you over your competitors simply because you're better and or cheaper then this is a good thing. Customers are getting what they want. And the market leader in this situation will have a hard time abusing their position because any they'll have competitors nipping at their heels if they slip up.
I would personally phrase it pedantically as not that the natural monopoly is good but that it exists because they are good. A fine distinction and a baked in assumption admittedly that if they were to no longer be good they would no longer dominate. Technically there are some other variables like if an extended stay on top would atrophy any competitors or not and the time scale operated upon.
On a century scale individual murderers aren't a huge concern to society because they are either dead or infirm by then.
