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A New Internet Business Model?

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#101

Post by nickysielicki »

lapcat wrote: post #93
nickysielicki wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare. Nothing in their idea challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to compete in constructing a reverse proxy service with LLM-centric content controls similar to cloudflare, whether that’s AWS WAF or akamai or some new startup.

Nothing in Google's search monopoly challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to complete... From the stats I've seen, Cloudflare has an 80% market share for reverse proxy services. 20% of all websites use Cloudflare, 50% of the most popular websites globally. That's a dangerous amount of concentration, and it's the only reason Cloudflare can propose this new business model for the internet a…

So what? I should hate them for that? Cloudflare is really good at what it does. Nobody has to use cloudflare, but people who know what they’re doing choose cloudflare because the service they provide is worth the minuscule price they charge and it solves the massive abuse and performance problems that otherwise plague the internet.

Bing/msn.com failed to displace Google because Google was simply better, not because Google played dirty.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#102

Post by atrettel »

As a researcher, I like the notion that there could be some incentive or mechanism to create new and original content, investigate new things, or conduct research in general. I'll group all of those under the umbrella of new content. I don't think things will work out as ideally as described here, but I can appreciate the sentiment and hope that it works out positively.

That said, the mental model that this article uses only recognizes that new content can fill in "holes" (interpolation). It also can expand the boundaries in new directions (extrapolation). That is a different and harder problem. If you distribute money to people "based on what most fills in the holes in the cheese", you really aren't expanding the boundaries of human knowledge as much as you are strengthening existing knowledge. They need to take boundary expansion into account here.

I also recognize that we know where the holes or boundaries are in many fields. They are "known unknowns". But this proposal does not take into account "unknown unknowns" --- things that we do not even realize that we don't know yet. It's going to be harder to incentive research into unknown unknowns when we don't even know what they are yet.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#103

Post by [deleted] »

velcrovan wrote: post #96
mid-kid wrote: post #87

> Unless you believe that content creators should work for free, or that they are somehow not needed anymore — both of which are naive assumptions Realistically, what was the benefit of the ad-driven model? From my point of view, most of the highly-valuable information came from the various forums, wikis and personal sites, on all of which people would publish the information for free. Ads were largely used to cover…

> Realistically, what was the benefit of the ad-driven model? ...Is this really what we want to preserve? Big publications and their interests? They are proposing a scheme by which AI scrapers would have to pay for the content they scrape, which could replace the ad-driven model and be viable for more creators.

[deleted]

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#104

Post by egorfine »

keehun wrote: post #65
grahameb wrote: post #3

I hope that the next big shift will be to undo the asymmetry that crept into the internet quickly after it first became popular. Let us host stuff at home. Let us run odd and strange and great systems wherever we are. Undo the cloud, undo the capture of the net – I'm old enough to remember when we just had a bunch of boxen under a desk somewhere, and it was pretty great.

This is one of the core usecases of cloudflared ( https://github.com/cloudflare/cloudflared )! Without having a static IP address or dynamic DNS, you can establish a connection between your machine in a private network with Cloudflare. And once a resource is on the Cloudflare network, you can pretty much do anything with it, including routing your visitors to that server and using the full Cloudflare stack including…

This project does exactly the opposite of what the GP was talking about. We need to selfhost to be independent of Cloudflare, not dive even deeper into it. cloudflared exists to embrace and extinguish and absolutely fuck that and everything that comes from Cloudflare.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#105

Post by raincole »

lapcat wrote: post #93
nickysielicki wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare. Nothing in their idea challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to compete in constructing a reverse proxy service with LLM-centric content controls similar to cloudflare, whether that’s AWS WAF or akamai or some new startup.

Nothing in Google's search monopoly challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to complete... From the stats I've seen, Cloudflare has an 80% market share for reverse proxy services. 20% of all websites use Cloudflare, 50% of the most popular websites globally. That's a dangerous amount of concentration, and it's the only reason Cloudflare can propose this new business model for the internet a…

> Nothing in Google's search monopoly challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to compete...

But it's true? It's still true today. The only worrying part of the story is that google also makes browser and OS, which doesn't apply to Cloudflare.

The above comparison to App Store is even weirder / more ridiculous. App devs publish on App Store because App Store is pre-installed on every iPhone already, so it maximizes the number of users they can reach. Websites use Cloudflare to protect themselves, at the cost of reducing the number of users they can reach. The two situations are so different that "false equivalence" is an understatement.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#106

Post by lapcat »

nickysielicki wrote: post #101
lapcat wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing in Google's search monopoly challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to complete... From the stats I've seen, Cloudflare has an 80% market share for reverse proxy services. 20% of all websites use Cloudflare, 50% of the most popular websites globally. That's a dangerous amount of concentration, and it's the only reason Cloudflare can propose this new business model for the internet a…

So what? I should hate them for that? Cloudflare is really good at what it does. Nobody has to use cloudflare, but people who know what they’re doing choose cloudflare because the service they provide is worth the minuscule price they charge and it solves the massive abuse and performance problems that otherwise plague the internet. Bing/msn.com failed to displace Google because Google was simply better, not because…

> So what? I should hate them for that?

Where did I mention hate? I don't care what emotions you feel or don't feel. The problem is the concentration of power in one company. That has nothing to do with emotion.

> Bing/msn.com failed to displace Google because Google was simply better, not because Google played dirty.

I don't think the courts agree with you about Google playing dirty. In any case, monopolies are inherently dangerous.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#107

Post by bobajeff »

grahameb wrote: post #3

I hope that the next big shift will be to undo the asymmetry that crept into the internet quickly after it first became popular. Let us host stuff at home. Let us run odd and strange and great systems wherever we are. Undo the cloud, undo the capture of the net – I'm old enough to remember when we just had a bunch of boxen under a desk somewhere, and it was pretty great.

I've been thinking lately how nice it was when the Internet had lots of phpBB-like forums spread around. Each one ran by a different server with it's own rules. None of them required your ID or phone number to join. No one really knew who anyone else was in real life. If you got tired of the people one forum you had several similar forums on different sites you could go to. It was fun seeing the kinds of things people would share in that environment. Everyone had the power to be seen, heard and disregarded in a short span of time.

I think of these things like they only exist in the past but I'm sure these places are still around only I don't go to them as much now. Probably because all the useful stuff these days exist in mainly reddit and the stackexchanges.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#108

Post by vogu66 »

lapcat wrote: post #31

> As we think about our role at Cloudflare in this developing market, it's not about protecting the status quo but instead helping catalyze a better business model for the future of Internet content creation. That means creating a level playing field. Ideally there should be lots of AI companies, large and small, and lots of content creators, large and small. Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the…

> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is already a monopoly though. From what I can tell, what they are saying here, besides proclaiming their continued existence, is that they and AI companies and content creators need the internet to exist.

And what they are building is on top of the 402 response, which anyone can use? So you could use that without using any CDN at all, without too much development cost?

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#109

Post by voxgen »

roughly wrote: post #35

Something that stuck out on this was the notion of the LLMs as models of human knowledge, and the notion that we could "see the gaps". There's been an interesting debate* in journalism over the concept of neutrality - what it means to "just present the facts," and whether that's actually a useful service, and what are actual facts, and how do you define a fact (it's gotten rather epistemological), and that's just for…

That discussion also makes me worry that they may try to use LLMs or LLM-based metrics to measure the size of the gap as a proxy for value of the content.

The landlord of the marketplace should probably not dabble in the appraisal of products, whether for factuality or value.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#110

Post by inerte »

mg wrote: post #86

ads have been the only micropayment system that has worked Why are micropayments so hard? I wonder how the web would look like if one could click "pay 1 cent to continue". Maybe content would become better? Maybe it would make one think "Hmm... one moment, is this something I want to read or am I just doomscrolling?".

It would like exactly how it is today. It's not hard to find someone not charging anything for the same piece of content, or not charging anything for another type of content that fills the same void.
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