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A New Internet Business Model?

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#51

Post by sbarre »

kibwen wrote: post #36

> Make no mistake, the Internet has never been free. There's always been a reward system that transferred value from consumers to creators and, in doing so, filled the Internet with content. Had the Internet not had that reward system it wouldn't be nearly as vibrant as it is today. This is an attempt to rewrite history. Back in the day, we stood up servers at our own expense and filled them with content for free, fo…

But "at our own expense" is not free, is it? In the end someone has always paid the bills for things being on the Internet.

That's the "never been free" in that statement.

I don't think they're saying what you think they're saying.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#52

Post by layer8 »

sbarre wrote: post #39
neuracnu wrote: post #30

In short: we'll have the machines tell the creators what to create. > You could imagine an AI company suggesting back to creators that they need more created about topics they may not have enough content about. Say, for example, the carrying capacity of unladened swallows because they know their subscribers of a certain age and proclivity are always looking for answers about that topic. The very pruning algorithms th…

"The machines" in this scenario are being informed by what the humans are asking for though.. They're not just making it up..

It means they will request faster horses, though.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#53

Post by observationist »

A whole new SEO style race to the bottom, as an arms race between quality and exploiting monetization begins, with cloudflare arbitraging every step of every interaction. Sounds great! Let's enshittify everything, and give total control to a private company who's more than happy to grant undue power to governments and bureaucrats to oppress and harass and exploit citizens, as long as they make a buck from every click and harvest every bit of data traversing every network on the planet.

What could possibly go wrong?

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#54

Post by velcrovan »

btbuildem wrote: post #15

Colour me cynical mauve, but you would have to pry the current business model out of advertisers' cold dead hands. What is most likely to happen is the so called Answer Engines will embed advertising into their results -- except in a more insidious, subtle, hard to detect and filter out manner. The Open Letter reads naive at best, asking us to imagine an Internet where creators are rewarded for "filling the holes in…

If AI companies continue to grow and be successful, and if they continue to depend on scraping human-written content to train their models, and if any tech can gain enough adoption to prevent AI from doing so without paying (and without hurting non-scraper readers), then creators will get paid. That is what the claim seems to be here. You can say it's a long shot, but it's not fundamentally at odds with the existing legible incentives.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#56

Post by zenmac »

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…

Is there currently a more open alternative to Cloudflare? I would assume that people don't really use it until they have significant traffic from all different parts of the world?

In which case for the self-host people we can just pick a decent CDN?

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#57

Post by motorest »

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.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#58

Post by zebomon »

I think providers of so-called "answer engines" will read the writing on the wall and find new ways to support content creators in order to keep their databases fresh, relevant, and centered on human perspectives. I also think that to see how the economics will play out, you only need to look at similarly centralized systems like Apple's App Store and Google's AdSense.

Because the providers will act as a single tunnel that all content passes through before reaching the end user, the tolls they collect will be large. So, I don't doubt that there will still be opportunities for content creators to earn money as answer engines siphon off more and more of the web's traffic, but expect those opportunities to be broadly low-paying, falling decidedly in the "side hustle" category.

AI providers will want to incentivize content creation. There will still be a glut of ready providers, and little reason for providers to make anything but small, nominal payments.

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#59

Post by alex_suzuki »

oceanplexian wrote: post #48
velcrovan wrote: post #25

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 mean, you shouldn't need to read a wall of text to understand what a business model is. It should be front and center, communicated clearly, and easy to understand. If I was an investor, the lack of clarity after reading a few paragraphs would concern me.

I read the entire article and I have no clue how this new business model will come to be. Something about filling holes im the cheese…

Re: A New Internet Business Model?

#60

Post by sbarre »

btbuildem wrote: post #15

Colour me cynical mauve, but you would have to pry the current business model out of advertisers' cold dead hands. What is most likely to happen is the so called Answer Engines will embed advertising into their results -- except in a more insidious, subtle, hard to detect and filter out manner. The Open Letter reads naive at best, asking us to imagine an Internet where creators are rewarded for "filling the holes in…

> What is most likely to happen is the so called Answer Engines will embed advertising into their results -- except in a more insidious, subtle, hard to detect and filter out manner.

This is the part of the new AI paradigm that concerns me the most, and I think you are correct.

If "pay for placement" (or worse "legislate for placement") in LLM training becomes a thing, then we lose all transparency as these biases get baked into the knowledge set, and users have no way of knowing where and when they get applied.

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