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

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

#91
post #35

Common Crawl is shown in their screen shot of "Providers" along side OpenAI and Antropic. The challenge is that Common Crawl is used for a lot of things that are not AI training. For example, it's a major source of content for the Wayback machine. In fact, that's the entire point of the Common Crawl project. Instead of dozens of companies writing and running their (poorly) designed crawlers and hitting everyone's sit…

> Common Crawl runs once and exposes the data in industry standard formats like WARC for other consumers And what stops companies from using this data for model training? Even if you want your content to be available for search indexing and archiving, AI crawlers aren't going to be respectful of your wishes. Hence the need for restrictive gatekeeping.

I mean, this is exactly what people like myself were predicting when these AI companies first started spooling up their operations. Abuse of the public square means that public goods are then restricted. It's perfectly rational for websites of any sort who have strong opinions on AI to forbid the use of common crawl, specifically because it is being abused by AI companies to train the AI's they are opposed to.

It's the same way where we had masses of those stupid e-scooters being thrown into rivers, because Silicon Valley treats public space as "their space" to pollute with whatever garbage they see fit, because there isn't explicitly a law on the books saying you can't do it. Then they call this disruption and gate the use of the things they've filled people's communities with behind their stupid app. People see this, and react. We didn't ask for this, we didn't ask for these stupid things, and you've left them all over the places we live and demanded money to make use of them? Go to hell. Go get your stupid scooter out of the river.

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

#92
post #89
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As an example, what if I'm not a DDoS-for-hire, but just a website that sells some software capable of launching DDoS attacks? Should I be able to buy Cloudfare protection? Should a site like Metasploit be allowed to purchase protection? Would you say this nuance is a major issue on the other big cloud providers? Your own grey-area example of Metasploit is hosted on AWS without any objections. Yet the other cloud p…

I'm asking you what you think Cloudfare should do. I'm not sure why you spun it around on me.

I think Cloudflare should make the bare minimum effort to kick services which are explicitly offering illegal DDoS attacks, given that their current policy of not doing anything unless legally compelled to is demonstrably enabling the overwhelming majority of DDoS providers to stay online, which has terrible optics when they're in the business of mitigating those attacks.

Whatever slippery slope excuses they give, somehow AWS, Azure, GCP, Fastly, Akamai and so on have managed to solve the impossible problem of turning away DDoS providers without imposing Orwellian censorship in the process.

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

#93
post #35

Common Crawl is shown in their screen shot of "Providers" along side OpenAI and Antropic. The challenge is that Common Crawl is used for a lot of things that are not AI training. For example, it's a major source of content for the Wayback machine. In fact, that's the entire point of the Common Crawl project. Instead of dozens of companies writing and running their (poorly) designed crawlers and hitting everyone's sit…

> Common Crawl runs once and exposes the data in industry standard formats like WARC for other consumers And what stops companies from using this data for model training? Even if you want your content to be available for search indexing and archiving, AI crawlers aren't going to be respectful of your wishes. Hence the need for restrictive gatekeeping.

The end result is browser extensions, like Recap the Law [1] for PACER, that streams data back from participating user browsers to a target for batch processing and eventual reconciliation.

Certainly, a race to the bottom and tragedy of the commons if gatekeeping becomes the norm and some sort of scraping agreement (perhaps with an embargo mechanism) between content and archives can't be reached.

[1] https://free.law/recap/faq

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

#95
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Common Crawl runs once and exposes the data in industry standard formats like WARC for other consumers And what stops companies from using this data for model training? Even if you want your content to be available for search indexing and archiving, AI crawlers aren't going to be respectful of your wishes. Hence the need for restrictive gatekeeping.

Either AI training is fair use or it isn't. If it's fair use then businesses shouldn't get a say in whether the data can be used for it. If it isn't, then the answer to your question is copyright law. Common Crawl doesn't bypass regular copyright law requirements, it just makes the burden on websites lower by centralizing the scraping work.

Copyright is only part of the equation, there's also the use of other people's resources

If what a government receptionist says is copyright-free, you still can't walk into their office thousands of times per day and ask various questions to learn what human answers are like in order to train your artificial neural network

The amount of scraping that happened in ~2020 as compared to 2024 is orders of magnitude different. Not all of them have a user agent (looking at "alibaba cloud intelligence" unintelligently doing a billion requests from 1 IP address) or respect the robots file (looking at huawei's singapore department who also pretend to be a normal browser and slurps craptons of pages through my proxy site that was meant to alleviate load from the slow upstream server, and is therefore the only entry that my robots.txt denies)

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

#96
post #83

Common Crawl is shown in their screen shot of "Providers" along side OpenAI and Antropic. The challenge is that Common Crawl is used for a lot of things that are not AI training. For example, it's a major source of content for the Wayback machine. In fact, that's the entire point of the Common Crawl project. Instead of dozens of companies writing and running their (poorly) designed crawlers and hitting everyone's sit…

> gatekeep access to those who pay and those who don't, and that applied whether they are bots or people. I'm already constantly being classified as bot. Just today: To check if something is included in a subscription that we already pay for, I opened some product page on the Microsoft website this morning. Full-page error: "We are currently experiencing high demand. Please try again later." It's static content but i…

> We are currently experiencing high demand. Please try again later.

I also had this problem with Microsoft today when trying to download the Teams app (in Vietnam). We use MS Teams at work and onboard one or two people a week. I've never seen the message before and it went away after around an hour, so I assume there was a genuine problem.

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

#97
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How often are the bots indexing it?

If you listen to the people complaining about bots at the moment, some bots are scraping the same pages over and over to the tune of terabytes per day because the bot operators have unlimited money and their targets don't.

> because the bot operators have unlimited money and their targets don't.

wget/curl vs django/rails, who wins?

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

#98
post #83

Common Crawl is shown in their screen shot of "Providers" along side OpenAI and Antropic. The challenge is that Common Crawl is used for a lot of things that are not AI training. For example, it's a major source of content for the Wayback machine. In fact, that's the entire point of the Common Crawl project. Instead of dozens of companies writing and running their (poorly) designed crawlers and hitting everyone's sit…

> gatekeep access to those who pay and those who don't, and that applied whether they are bots or people. I'm already constantly being classified as bot. Just today: To check if something is included in a subscription that we already pay for, I opened some product page on the Microsoft website this morning. Full-page error: "We are currently experiencing high demand. Please try again later." It's static content but i…

Lately I’ve been noticing captchas have been increasingly difficult day by day on Firefox. Checking the box use to go through without issue, but now it’s been starting to pop up challenges with the boxes that fade after clicking. Just like your experience, chrome has no hiccups on the same machine.

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

#99
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Companies have been trying to find novel ways to bypass fair use / public domain laws for a long time. Each time they do, we see more consolidation of the media, and lower pay for the people that produce the content. I don’t see why this particular effort will turn out differently.

I wonder if there's a way to test this hypothesis. Does content being freely reproducible with minor modification increase the demand for content creators since new content is more valuable than the existing that can be copied. I'd guess that since AI can fair-useify a work faster than any human, that fair-use reviewers, compilers/collagers, re-imaginers, etc content creators will be devalued. However, AIs are as yet…

> "I'm assuming that AI companies pay for the work that they use in some way."

That mistaken assumption is at the heart of the problem under discussion.

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

#100
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say let's get rid of copyright and software patents altogether ;)

they're already gone but only if you're well funded (OpenAI)

I've always heard it as "the golden rule:" those who have the gold make the rules
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