Cloudflare's new marketplace lets websites charge AI bots for scraping

Who is overseeing who in your scenario? I think the decision is up to the company doing the contracting. They get to choose how to handle it - if they don't like the results, operations or anything else about Cloudflare they should cancel the contract and get a new vendor. If they are fine with those and want to keep it, they can do that too.

> Except they randomly find some people's "key" incorrect without giving them any recourse.

If my apartment key doesn't work, I don't contact Schlage, I contact the rental company. They may send a new key, or fix the door/lock, and even work with Schlage to fix some root problem. My contact point is still only the company I have a relationship with.

Of course the analogy breaks down here - because in the public web case it's often more like the door to a grocery store. If that is stuck locked and the store can't open, you contact the store - they'll work with their maintenance and vendors to let you in. Until its fixed they just say "sorry you don't get in", and maybe they decide to ban you for making trouble (not good business, but the store gets to do that if they want).

Lets stick with that example and generalize it to all places of business. Plenty of them have security that can ask you to leave and refuse you entry. Bars have bouncers, mall have "cops", office buildings have receptionists and "cops" - in any of those cases they can ask you to leave the premesis, or prevent you from entering the premesis and they don't have to tell you why or give you a course to remedy it. Why do you expect cloudflare to tell you why you can't access a business that doesn't want your traffic?

If you can't get to a site, contact the site owner and ask for them to figure out how to let you in - they may say no, they may tell you that they don't care if they get your traffic, or the may tell you that they'll contact cloudflare and maybe you'll see a resolution.

> Except you don't get a warning before you actually try to enter. It can be added at any point.

Again - a company can refuse your business or your entry, and they don't have to warn you in advance or tell you why. They can even change their rules without warning or explanation. If you have some sort of business with them, and they want to continue it, you have all sorts of recourse - you can call them, get a lawyer to send threatening letters or sue them, or stop paying them since they aren't fulfilling their end of the contract. Your only contract with random public websites is the HTTP protocol - even that has all sorts of "reject without explanation" options - sure they could set up error codes correctly, or just always return 500 or whatever.

> In the end, sure you might have that freedom to restrict as you wish, but someone shouldn't be doing it at this scale without informing people and without oversight.

Someone shouldn't be providing a service that people want for their sites? There can't be a business that helps people who don't want your traffic to actually reject your traffic?

Again who is overseeing who? The site owner is allowed to reject your traffic - either they don't want your traffic or they don't care if they don't get your traffic. The owners have done a cost-benefit analysis and have decided the cost of your traffic does not outweigh the benefit of using Cloudflare to reject it. I don't see how this is Cloudflare's fault.

It seems to me that you've been deemed as "not worth the hassle" and that sucks for you. I just don't see that makes Cloudflare the bad guy - if you actually are worth the hassle, talk to the people responsible for the site about why you are worth the hassle and get them to make the situation right, they are the ones who hired cloudflare and decided you weren't worth the hassle to begin with. They are the ones who can change their setting or their vendor or whatever, not the company that was hired to execute a contract on the site owner's behalf.

The sum of all websites contracting CF can be more damaging to me as an individual than it is to the companies doing the contracting. So I should definitely have a say on how they operate.

> If my apartment key doesn't work, I don't contact Schlage, I contact the rental company.

Yeah, except with your analogy it's Schlage that's breaking or fixing your keys, not the rental company. You don't know why or now. Some days it takes more effort than others to open your door. Your option is of course to move apartments, but you can't boycott Schlage, if the landlord decides to use them.

> Why do you expect cloudflare to tell you why you can't access a business that doesn't want your traffic?

Because for example if it's based on my native language or religious preferences it would be literally illegal in real life.

> Someone shouldn't be providing a service that people want for their sites? There can't be a business that helps people who don't want your traffic to actually reject your traffic?

Yeah, they should not be able to do so without someone overseeing that they aren't blocking accessibility-oriented browsers or discriminating based on non-technical factors that just happen to correlate in some other way.

> It seems to me that you've been deemed as "not worth the hassle" and that sucks for you.

I hope you get to enjoy kafkaesque technical obstacles thrown at you for no fault of your own, and I hope that sucks for you.