131–140 of 218 posts
It sucks big time to live in an internet with cloudflare
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?".
Because Visa & Mastercard are greedy dicks?
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…
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…
That's precisely what's happening here: Cloudflare is leveraging its CDN dominance to become a kind of payment processor for the internet.
> they have serious competition in the CDN business
Do they? I just said they have 80% market share.
> they have the direct incentive not to screw their customers which Google lacked
Google Search is free service for users but a paid service for advertisers. The advertisers are Google's customers. Theoretically, Google has an incentive not to screw its customers, but practically they can, because of their search monopoly.
> 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…
You know what that looks like? rent. It looks like home owners setting rent as high as the market can bear, until it becomes almost no advantage at all to participate.
It sure looks like Cloudflare wants to be the platform for AI royalty collections. But creators, customers, sellers - they are all hostage to the platforms they can't avoid. That is where the money sink is.
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…
I have fully read Cloudflare's proposal, as I have RSL, and L402.
In its current state, RSL is not a full solution, but can be. The spec does not cover payments. Its basically just a new token type, which crawlers would register for to crawl your content, and predefined responses for more detailed states. But nothing around payments, yet.
Cloudflare's solution is basically the same as L402. This is very sad for me, because their attempt is basically one of locking down the ecosystem in order to create a monopoly.
If they were really about creating a fair internet where "pay per crawl" is possible (it already was with L402), they would openly support L402, implement it for their gateway, and try to push the industry towards it. But no, they just want the biggest piece of the pie; a pie that doesn't even exist yet.
What CF didn't address is how the smallest content creators are going to be "making deals" with the Answer Engines. They aren't.
tldr, surely this article needs an ai summary at the top.
You have to go 2/3rds of the way before you hit this:
> some number of dollars per AI company’s monthly active users going into a collective pool to be distributed out to content creators based on what most fills in the holes
and this:
> You could imagine an AI company suggesting back to creators that they need more created about topics they may not have enough content about.
Did the author not try to compose this thought in their head before they wrote it down? Did the author (or at least one editor) read this before publishing? I wouldn't get away with a sentence like this in 11th grade, and I'm not even from a natively English speaking country.
This seems completely disconnected from the reality that's been unfolding before all of us for the past few years:
> it seems potentially we're on the cusp of a new, better, and maybe healthier Internet business model
Repetition
> It may seem impossibly idealistic today, but the good news is...
then again:
> It may seem impossible...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> How would that work short of them buying most of the fiber in the world? Did Google need that to dominate search?
* Assuming AI companies will pay for content instead of just stealing it
* Assuming they'll pay enough to sustain a business, even though they're incentivized and positioned to pay as little as possible
* Assuming AI companies will give a shit about trustworthy content, as the moat (at least right now) for developing an LLM is too huge for them to seriously worry about competitors. And even if they did, it'd likely result in consolidation rather than innovation
* Assuming the AI companies (or anyone) would even be able to distinguish credible human content from AI generated slop
I don't see this working out. Props to cloud flare marketing though. This advertisement generated a good amount of discussion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Google’s monopoly is dangerous because they linked success in search to dominance in other areas That's precisely what's happening here: Cloudflare is leveraging its CDN dominance to become a kind of payment processor for the internet. > they have serious competition in the CDN business Do they? I just said they have 80% market share. > they have the direct incentive not to screw their customers which Google lacked…
Seems like the moment is ripe for this move. In recent news Google partnered with stablecoins and traditional payment processors to create an agent-to-agent micropayment system (AP2)
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/ai-machine-learning/a...