In this first 2026 edition of This Week in NET, João Tomé is joined by Patrick Day from Cloudflare’s Impact & Policy team to break down the recently released Cloudflare Impact Report — including how Cloudflare supports elections, protects journalists, advances Internet standards, and expands access to secure AI infrastructure.

At the start, we also go over some of our recent blog posts:

• Acquisitions: Astro and Human Native join the Cloudflare ecosystem.

• Technical Deep Dive: How a small DNS optimization in 1.1.1.1 exposed a decades-old ambiguity in early Internet standards.

• Global Trends: A severe government-directed Internet shutdown in Iran and BGP anomalies observed in Venezuela.

Mentioned topics:

• Cloudflare Impact Report
• The Cloudflare Blog