And ok, I'll give some leeway in those numbers looking at the map on the linked page, 35% or so of source traffic is clustered over five countries so that distribution skews and some pops around those source countries are going to be hit harder than others. Still, maybe add an order of magnitude and I'll be a little less dismissive.
It’s called marketing.
This is on the level of BrandonM's famous comment on Dropbox. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
And ooh, ooh, I can flippantly dismiss a comment by calling back to that infamous comment as well! [0] You're actually posting this as a former VP? Geez dude, lighten up, they're not paying you anymore.
Yes, anyone can shove a bunch of network equipment into a bunch of cabinets.
No, not anyone can shove a bunch of network equipment into a bunch of cabinets and run a service like cloudflare on top of that.
And is your argument really “I’ve spun up 16.5 PoP locations before, so I know what I’m talking about?”
Actually quite a few more than that, but yes.
They have a product. This is marketing for that product. The incentive is to make money. It's very clear imo.
Ironically, their abuse report does validate the domain being used to route traffic is a registered customer domain. But the abuse report and even Slack pings have yet to affect the traffic. It’s incredibly frustrating because you’d expect a company like Cloudflare, which positions itself as a defender against DDoS and similar threats, to take action much more quickly when they’re part of the problem.