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Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#111

Post by cphoover »

This doesn't seem to solve the issue that website operators face... which is providing a free public experience to humans while the price of hosting is driven up by increased bot traffic. The issue isn't charging for API access with request caps, that's not hard to do. It's preserving the free experience for our users while our traffic is increasingly made up of bots. The problem is that AI has made it increasingly difficult to tell bot from human. Baking microtransactions attached to APIs into an internet standard does not solve the core issue... And if we can't tell bot from human, why would bots choose to pay rather than just use the public endpoints we serve to our customers?

For example, take a large online retailer... They have to show their products to customers (for free) for people to be able to shop, but increasingly they see spikes in traffic that match what would be expected from targeted bot attacks or scraping... But this traffic is getting more and more difficult to distinguish from legitimate traffic to the website. They could easily add this x402 middleware to their services, or they could offer API access to their product catalog for a price and enforce usage limits... But if they cannot reliably detect human users from bot/agent users, they have no way of pushing the bot/agent users to paid access... And why would the people running these bots pay when they're already getting what they need for free? Now Cloudflare cannot even reliably block bot traffic, and there are AI based browsing/scraping tools available now for bypassing Cloudflare.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#112

Post by cphoover »

ryan_n wrote: post #53
jf93ap29sh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not built-in, you can probably put it together through Cloudflare itself. If a request goes to the protected path, if detected as bot: hard HTTP redirect to the path set in the monetization gateway, if human: allow and don't redirect.

Is there actually a reliable way to differentiate human from bot?

As I understand it as models driving agent behavior of headless browsers are getting more and more sophisticated it's getting harder to reliably predict.

The same way LLM's without watermarking cannot be reliably classified as "not-human" neural-network driven scraping tools are getting harder to detect.

Cloudflare, and DataDome position themselves as companies that can detect automated traffic using things like IP reputation, behavioral signals, timing... But these things can be faked through proxy-networks, human behavior signals can be imitated with generative AI the same way text can be, web bots can utilize neural networks to generate trajectories and timings similar to those of humans.

If you can have an AI use a browser the same way a human can how can you distinguish the two?

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#113

Post by mxuribe »

dgudkov wrote: post #35

We need standards and protocols, not another megacorp inserting itself between people. Micropayments should be part of the HTTP protocol.

I hear ya! But technically http status 402 has set that expectation of micropayments at the http level for quite a long time (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes#402) ...but little to no one has done much of anything with it...and so now, this foundation and cloudflare seem to be doing something with it. Whether it will be good or not of course remains to be seen. So, not a new concept, merely a new implementation.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#114

Post by mxuribe »

So, the snake oil salesman in me immediately wonders if this will become the new landscape for spam....It might go something like the following...

1. Establish domain names and relevant cloudflare account including the monetization gateway (associated rules, etc.).

2. Then host a ton of crap content across a wide swath of topics...not even decent quality...merely a step above old school style SEO keywords...just enough low quality "honey" to attract the AI flies, and their high volumes of traffic.

3. Charge very low amounts to ensure the AI "visitors" won't balk programmatically at the cost.

4. Then wait for lots of AI traffic (attracted by the "honey")...and then profit!

Obviously lots of holes in the above...but, unless I'm missing something, it feels like more spam headed our way (because the AI agents will swallow up all the crap content created only for triggering usage costs)...which is a shame. Because while I'm not sure about this overall approach of this gateway, I certainly would welcome web authors to get paid something for their efforts! If cloudflare can help achieve this for web authors, then I'm in favor! Of course, the cynic in me also recognizes that by being the middleman, cloudflare does stand to gain whether the volume of traffic is for good content or spam crap. Is cloudflare a new type of bank now?

Must think happy thoughts! The internet feels darker every day, but, must think happy thoughts!

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#115

Post by azeemba »

mxuribe wrote: post #114

So, the snake oil salesman in me immediately wonders if this will become the new landscape for spam....It might go something like the following... 1. Establish domain names and relevant cloudflare account including the monetization gateway (associated rules, etc.). 2. Then host a ton of crap content across a wide swath of topics...not even decent quality...merely a step above old school style SEO keywords...just enou…

Crawler, AI or not, cannot afford to pay per visit. The entire model of crawling works because the incremental cost of each crawl is so low. Even fractions of a penny would be prohibitive.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#116

Post by skybrian »

mxuribe wrote: post #114

So, the snake oil salesman in me immediately wonders if this will become the new landscape for spam....It might go something like the following... 1. Establish domain names and relevant cloudflare account including the monetization gateway (associated rules, etc.). 2. Then host a ton of crap content across a wide swath of topics...not even decent quality...merely a step above old school style SEO keywords...just enou…

If it gets off the ground it will attract SEO, but the people running agents will have incentives to use a better search engine, or maybe even whitelist known good domains.

Think of it as a gullibility tax. AI is currently pretty gullible but perhaps that will change?

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#118

Post by xlayn »

X402... I was not aware, I had this idea of making HTTP connection depend on a monero transaction, the monero transaction should take around 3 secs of the average computer/cellphone... once you have paid that you can access the resource. You wanna crawl the whole internet non stop, you pay non stop, 3 secs is probably the same as we pay in ads for those without adblockers and then content generators can start getting paid for the resources they generate.

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#119

Post by Bender »

gonight wrote: post #82
VladVladikoff wrote: post #13

I am not a fan of the growing trend that Cloudflare is the gatekeeper of the internet. Personally I will never support this company, or firewall any of my websites behind it.

I recently had to build a system to drop inbound traffic originating from cloudflare ASNs to prevent bad actors using WARP proxies, no legitimate cloudflare traffic usecases for anything inbound. Getting increasingly sick of cloudflare.

I do something similar seems to get the job done.

    for BadActor in $(curl -A Mozilla "https://api.cloudflare.com/local-ip-ranges.csv"|grep -Ev "::|/32"|awk -F "," '{print $1}'|sort | uniq); do ip route add blackhole "${BadActor}" 2>/dev/null;done
Something similar can be done with AWS EC2

    https://ip-ranges.amazonaws.com/ip-ranges.json

Re: Monetization Gateway: Charge for any resource behind Cloudflare via x402

#120

Post by xlayn »

cphoover wrote: post #111

This doesn't seem to solve the issue that website operators face... which is providing a free public experience to humans while the price of hosting is driven up by increased bot traffic. The issue isn't charging for API access with request caps, that's not hard to do. It's preserving the free experience for our users while our traffic is increasingly made up of bots. The problem is that AI has made it increasingly d…

I would like to argue that trying to provide a free service is non achievable, most of the time it will drill down to ads, people are already paying electricity and time in ads. If we pay say 3 secs of compute time of monero, and everyone pay the same... you remove the ads from the internet, people will start gettind paid without gate keepers for content they generate, and you can charge the AI machine for ingesting your content.
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