Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A New Internet Business Model?

blog.cloudflare.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 218 posts

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#111

Post by n4bz0r »

> Had the Internet not had that reward system it wouldn't be nearly as vibrant as it is today.

> What's most interesting is what content companies are getting the best deals. It's not the ragebait headline writers. It's not the news organizations writing yet another take on what's going on in politics. It's not the spammy content farms full of drivel. Instead, it's Reddit and other quirky corners that best remind us of the Internet of old.

Removing all the vibrant parts is long due, apparently :')

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#112

Post by acdha »

vogu66 wrote: post #108
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 CD…

How is Cloudflare a monopoly as opposed to just being popular? The CDN, security, edge compute, etc. markets all have multiple popular competitors.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#113

Post by GMoromisato »

I don't know if this is going to work, but at least they are skating to where the puck is going to be.

The new model will be something like:

1. A content creator creates a web site and uses Cloudflare.

2. AI companies pay Cloudflare to allow them to scrape content.

3. Cloudflare gives a cut to the content creator.

4. Users pay AI companies and get their questions answered.

A few observations/predictions:

* If this works, there will be competitors to Cloudflare (AWS, Microsoft, etc.) who will offer better terms to content creators. Content creators can then (easily) switch to whichever reverse-proxy has the best terms.

* Media companies will transform into Cloudflare competitors, aggregating content and monetizing by selling to AI. Their pitch will be that the content will be more curated than Cloudflare. Their brands might survive if the AIs pass the source of the content all the way to the user. For example, the AI says something like, "According to a BBC contributor....". Otherwise, media brands will no longer be known to consumers (only AI companies will care).

* If this works, AI companies will try to cut out the middle-man by building their own ecosystem of content creators.

* As more and more people get their answers directly from AI, it will be easier to sell content directly to AI companies. I.e., instead of publishing something on the open web and relying on Robots.txt to protect your content, you will sell content straight to the AI company. NOTE: If this happens, then the only way this will scale is if the AI itself decides which content it wants to buy for the next training run.

* At the limit, the web and everything about it basically disappears. Everyone gets their content directly from an AI and never visits a web site directly. Therefore, web sites disappear and all that's left is the HTTP protocol, which is used by AI clients to talk to the AI cloud.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#114

Post by swed420 »

motorest wrote: post #57
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…

I see what you mean, and I am divided on the issue. On one hand, I don't think it's fair to have AI companies to freely scrape the world without fairly compensating content producers. On the other hand, adding more gatekeepers to the web ends up killing it. This feels like a lose-lose situation.

In some positive news today, Cloudflare is sponsoring the Ladybird browser effort:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332860

That's not nothing.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#115

Post by visarga »

Say AI company A pays and gets access, trains a model-A. Now come AI company B, C, D.. and they train on synthetic data from model A. Do they need to license the original content anymore? (morally and practically)

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#116

Post by rickydroll »

nickysielicki wrote: post #74
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. 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.

It could be interesting to build a small startup that identifies hate speech on Twitter, Threads, Blue Sky, and other platforms.

I envision a UI that displays the message and, in a sidebar, lists what aspects of the message classify it as hate speech. Then, like a spam filter, you could decide to block the message.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1084806... https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01577 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03346

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#117

Post by raincole »

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.

Do you want more people to view your content?

If no, you can still do that today.

If yes, then imagine the other 1,000,000 people who think likewise. That was how we got where we are today.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#118

Post by asim »

I don't think they actually know what the future business model is. No one really knows. What people are presenting is iterative models. That's fine but the model will be quite different. Ok we'll need subscriptions and to pay creators but I believe if everything is crypto and stablecoin based it's all going to be pay per view or pay per query because you know a lot of people just want that specific content from a specific source because of reputation or because that's what they like. I'm not paying for 5 different agents for that bespoke experience just like I'm not paying for NYT, WSJ and multiple other publications because it is insanity to price up what should effectively be pay per article. So maybe on the backend creators get a royalty kick back just like the music industry but on the consumer side I definitely think beyond subscriptions with the advent of crypto wallets we're going towards micro transactions for everything.

Ok the the toxic nature of the internet and social media in general and what has become of our digital age, totally agree that it's rage and click bait. I wrote something to that effect here https://github.com/micro/mu/issues/27. But I personally don't think we're going to directly interact with agents the whole time. They will exist, they will be somewhere in the middle layers, there might even be a chat interface that replaces search queries with answers but I think the whole web as a whole and social media needs a rethink. Ads as a business model has to die, even though clearly it won't and we need to shift our attention elsewhere.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#119

Post by lapcat »

raincole wrote: post #105
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…

> 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…

> The only worrying part of the story is that google also makes browser and OS, which doesn't apply to Cloudflare.

Well actually: https://blog.cloudflare.com/supporting-the-future-of-the-ope...

> 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.

This seems like a weird statement, because App Store is the only way of publishing apps on iPhone. The statement might make sense if you were talking about the Mac, on which App Store is pre-installed, but developers can still publish outside the App Store.

> Websites use Cloudflare to protect themselves, at the cost of reducing the number of users they can reach.

How does Cloudflare reduce the number of users they can reach?

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#120

Post by acdha »

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…

Google’s monopoly is dangerous because they linked success in search to dominance in other areas, and especially the most popular web browser.

I wouldn’t recommend trusting any large company but so far Cloudflare doesn’t appear to be pulling a Google because they sell directly rather than to third parties. Google never charged for search so they ended up doing a reverse acquisition into DoubleClick to get advertisers to pay for the searches we do. Cloudflare does have a free tier but their paid services are decidedly not free and since they have serious competition in the CDN business, zero-trust, etc. they have the direct incentive not to screw their customers which Google lacked. I’d get worried if that ever changes.

Post reply on HN