121–130 of 218 posts
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?".
Regulation.
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> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare. I don't get it. Can you point out where Cloudflare gains the power to prevent Google or any other company from doing the same?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly It's not impossible. But it's hard.
Given CloudFlare's direction, I won't be surprised if they start offering "anti adblock as a service" soon. Detecting it is still rather simple, and add in some punishments such as temporary IP blocking, and it would be rather effective. (Note that everything CloudFlare talked about in this blog post also applies to adblock users, not just AI agents.) The golden age of the Internet is not where people do it for money…
Title is: Cloudflare’s 2025 Annual Founders’ Letter ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru... )
Everyone seems to be dismissing this without reading it. As a content publisher, I am very interested in any proposal that results in me getting residual payments from AI scrapers. That would indeed be a new internet business model. This is also being attempted by RSL with their “Crawler Authentication Protocol” ( https://rslstandard.org/guide/web-crawlers ) for demanding proof of licensing from scrapers and RSL Coll…
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You can put images up on a public website, but you still retain copyright & can control the images' use. This is no different from any kind of digital content...
And Cloudflare is trying to legitimise a “business model” resting on the assumption that it’s ok for AI vealers to scrape content in the first place. “Opt-in” is not in Silicon Valley vocabulary.
> 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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly It's not impossible. But it's hard.
How would that work short of them buying most of the fiber in the world? A natural monopoly is a big problem for ISPs but they don’t do last-mile and they don’t appear to be anywhere close to being able to manipulate thr transit market.
Did Google need that to dominate search?
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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.
That is a lot of hands... Are you AI generated? lol =3
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> 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…
Yeah and if it succeeds (while unlikely) it proves Google-style monopoly isn't that bad and permanent.
> because App Store is the only way of publishing apps on iPhone
You're going to be really surprised to find out iOS porn game is a thing in Asia :)
But that's not my point. My point was Cloudflare and AppStore are very different things.
> How does Cloudflare reduce the number of users they can reach?
Any barrier would affect the number of users you reach. Even just a capcha or +200ms loading time.