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The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

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Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#12

Post by jmtame »

I pretty much use Perplexity exclusively at this point, instead of Google. I'd rather just get my questions answered than navigate all of the ads and slowness that Google provides. I'm fine with paying a small monthly fee, but I don't want Cloudflare being the gatekeeper.

Perhaps a way to serve ads through the agents would be good enough. I'd prefer that to be some open protocol than controlled by a company.

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#14

Post by matt-p »

Operyl wrote: post #8
matt-p wrote: post #5

I have zero issue with Ai Agents, if there's a real user behind there somewhere. I DO have a major issue with my sites being crawled extremely aggressively by offenders including Meta, Perplexity and OpenAI - it's really annoying realising that we're tying up several cpu cores on AI crawling. Less than on real users and google et al.

They're getting to the point of 200-300RPS for some of my smaller marketing sites, hallucinating URLs like crazy. It's fucking insane.

I'm seeing around the same, as a fairly constant base load. Even more annoying when it's hitting auth middleware constantly, over and over again somehow expecting a different answer.

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#15

Post by theideaofcoffee »

Your ideas are intriguing to me and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Joking aside, I think the ideas and substance are great and sorely needed. However, I can only see the idea of a sort of token chain verification as running into the same UX problems that plagued (plagues?) PGP and more encryption-focused processes. The workflow is too opaque, requires too much specialized knowledge that is out of reach for most people. It would have to be wrapped up into something stupid simple like an iOS FaceID modal to have any hope of succeeding with the general public. I think that's the idea, that these agents would be working on behalf of their owners on their own devices, so it has to be absolutely seamless.

Otherwise, rock on.

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#16

Post by impure »

Well, if you have a better way to solve this that’s open I’m all ears. But what Cloudflare is doing is solving the real problem of AI bots. We’ve tried to solve this problem with IP blocking and user agents, but they do not work. And this is actually how other similar problems have been solved. Certificate authorities aren’t open and yet they work just fine. Attestation providers are also not open and they work just fine.

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#17

Post by nromiun »

didibus wrote: post #4
jjangkke wrote: post #3

I would love to get off Cloudflare but there are no real good alternatives

AWS is an alternative no?

Bankruptcy as a surprise gift is not an alternative. Even those that use big cloud providers like AWS and GCP use CDNs like Cloudflare to protect themselves. And there is no free CDN like Cloudflare.

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#18

Post by skybrian »

This is sort of like how email is based on Internet standards but a large percentage of email users use Gmail. The Internet standards Cloudflare is promoting are open, but Cloudflare has a lot of power due to having so many customers.

(What are some good alternatives to Cloudflare?)

Another way the situation is similar: email delivery is often unreliable and hard to implement due to spam filters. A similar thing seems to be happening to the web.

Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

#20

Post by TIPSIO »

Everyone loves the dream of a free for all and open web.

But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots? E.g.: They just blindly trust someone is sending Agent vs Training bots and super duper respecting robots.txt? Get real...

Or, fine what if they do respect robots.txt, but they buy the data that may or may not have been shielded through liability layers via "licensed data"?

Unless you're reddit, X, Google, or Meta with scary unlimited budget legal teams, you have no power.

Great video: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/M0QyOp7zqcY

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