Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare.
The "level playing field" rhetoric reminds me so much of Apple talking about the App Store. This new internet business model is just the App Store, substituting websites for apps and Cloudflare for Apple. The system only works with some middleman between the AI companies and the content creators.
This feels like a lose-lose situation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45332860
That's not nothing.
LOL, what?
Nothing in their idea challenges the underlying tech behind the internet. Anyone is free to compete in constructing a reverse proxy service with LLM-centric content controls similar to cloudflare, whether that’s AWS WAF or akamai or some new startup.
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 and be taken seriously.
I envision a UI that displays the message and, in a sidebar, lists what aspects of the message classify it as hate speech. Then, like a spam filter, you could decide to block the message.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1084806... https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.01577 https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.03346
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?
It's not impossible. But it's hard.
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 CDN at all, without too much development cost?
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.
In which case for the self-host people we can just pick a decent CDN?
For mostly-static or static-site content it's pretty nice all around. I've not gotten into the SQLite service so much though, which I might and seems interesting.. there's also Turso to consider as an alternative option... Not to mention Deno, Fastly and other similar options.
Kind of hoping to see something similar start to gain traction to support wasm backend systems similarly.
This is beyond their DDoS/Proxy protection, but worth considering as part of what they offer. There's a lot there to like.
To be fair to apple, many billion dollar businesses have been built for and distributed by the app store. Think about all people employed to work on mobile apps, all those people going to local taco truck for lunch owned by an immigrant, that immigrant buying a nice christmas present for their kid, etc.
This sentence is missing something essential:
Many billion dollar businesses have been built for iPhone and distributed by the app store.
iPhone is the platform, whereas App Store is merely the exclusive method of software distribution as dictated by Apple. Contrast with the Apple Mac, where the App Store is not the exclusive method of software distribution.
"Content creators" are part of the problem. Generating endless "content", which isn't very useful or valuable, and creates too much "content supply", which devalues it. This then creates a giant "soup" of content that viewers drown in, trying to find some content that isn't as identically useless as all the rest. But the big incumbents love it, because they use this content soup to collect money from - you guessed it - ad companies. (Those same companies they don't want to make ad-blockers against...)
So now that search is dead, they need to find a new way to drink from the ad-dollar faucet. At first it'll be "pay content creators from AI subscription money", but then AI will be offered "free with ads", and then later "paid with ads". And nobody's going to stop it, because everyone is "happy": the viewer gets their free crap (with ads), the content creators get a few pennies, the big companies rake in billions, and ad companies continue their "industrial welfare" by pouring their excess profits into this whole system as ad-dollars. The great commoditization of eyeballs continues.
On the other hand, Youtube is pretty good. You can make some money off of youtube viewings, but what it's really great for is building an audience. Musicians know that Youtube is a good tool for building a successful music career.
As for devaluing content with oversaturation, yeah, agree with this. Ironically, media is both the bread and butter of the internet, but it has also become devalued with the shear amount of it. Still, this isn't a problem of the media companies. Content creators can either chose to engage and or not, and hope they breakthrough.
And you kind of said it, "The great commoditization of eyeballs continues." Money makes the world go round, and nothing is free. If we want a vibrant internet, companies have got to find a way to make money (although, monopolies aren't a good thing, but paying for good content and services seems like a good idea).
If the answer is that it's the labels who owns the rights and puts the music there, then the next question is why do the labels do it if Spotify pays so little.
If the answer is that Spotify pays decently to the labels, then isn't all of this just the labels exploiting the artists as usual?
He got 80 million streams of his music in 2023, which paid out $386k to his rights holders according to a Spotify payout calculator. Not great, but not bad. https://musically.com/2023/12/01/weird-al-yankovics-spotify-...
In the book he explains how these micropayments would be sent out to all the websites you visit, etc. And you can have a built-in mechanism to combat the "star system" that tech automatically enables, where a few people get the most money.
Lanier's proposal was that ISPs take charge of this issue, but perhaps Cloudflare can make it work. The less cynical interpretation would be that later they federate the system or even turn into a non-profit.
People need to think long and hard about why they think there should be unlimited stuff on the internet. Have you looked around? It's mostly crap. Random scribblings by opinionated amateurs, exhibitionists shilling snake-oil, "products" like online games or unlimited videos designed to sell your personal information for a profit, "news" that is 100% gossip, and an unlimited number of echo chambers. We need less incentive for all this crap, not more. But ads are never going away, so it's moot.
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 Collective (https://rslcollective.org) for providing the licensing itself. The missing piece there is the ability to detect scrapers with high accuracy without punishing regular browsing humans.
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.
https://iabtechlab.com/announcing-content-monetization-proto...
Maybe people have agendas, or maybe they have different perspectives that should be reconciled?
As a content consumer, I'm also hoping to be part of the ecosystem. I already use Patreon a lot as "AdBlock absolution", but it doesn't fix the market dynamics. Major content platforms tend to stagnate or worsen over time, because they prefer to sell impressions to advertisers than a good product to consumers.
It always bothers me a little when people describe themselves as a content publisher or content creator. Why content? Why not say you are a short film maker or writer or musician or videographer or journalist or painter or photographer or ...?
In the past, your work has been merely content to the people who are looking for bits -- any bits -- to place between and around the stuff they really care about: ads. These days I suppose your work may be seen by some as grist for the AI mill.
By calling your work content you are acceding to the idea that your work is only valuable in other contexts. It isn't! I bet it's something you made with care and thought.
Or maybe I misread and you really are a content publisher. You're the person running the CMS who is looking for other people's work to monetize. If so, nevermind.
Imagine trying to create and distribute a movie without the backing of your local distributor/broadcasting cartel. Only instead of gating the movie theatre, Cloudflare is the single access to all things web. Also, based in the US, so good luck producing content their government doesn’t like.
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.
So you use a public resource and presumably like the upside that comes with sharing on it, but you want to limit uses now that someone has found one that you don't like, so you're fine with degrading that public resource?
You could always share things privately or behind a paywall if you don't want them available publicly. But people seem to want to have their cake and eat it too.
I get why a hosting provider would want to limit crawlers to save bandwidth. The "creator" angle is just greed.
Can you say more? what is the "public resource" I'm using as a content publisher? In that role I see myself more as the provider of a public resource (my content), not a user.
And, the idea being proposed is a version of what you're talking about (paywall). Not allowing crawlers to scrap your site unless they compensate you is a form of paywall, just for crawlers...
...But, I do agree with one aspect you're saying about greed, Cloudflare is probably being self serving in this. An open standard seems like it'd be a better solution than having one company control content payment.
I think of these things like they only exist in the past but I'm sure these places are still around only I don't go to them as much now. Probably because all the useful stuff these days exist in mainly reddit and the stackexchanges.
We can dream. ISP says NO!
If no, you can still do that today.
If yes, then imagine the other 1,000,000 people who think likewise. That was how we got where we are today.
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 hosting costs of the large forums and wikis, but the content creators saw not a single dime.
Over the last 15 years, the search results have shifted from this, to instead become 100% news articles and SEO spam, all with a lot of fluff and very little substance, tons of ads, pop-ups, autoplay videos and subscription walls. All of this is well funded thanks to the business model, but for what? I can't imagine anyone sitting through all that crap to get to what they were looking for. There's a reason people would tell others to add "reddit" to the search query only a few years back, and even that's becoming less worthwhile.
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.
> Swiss Cheese — there's a lot of cheese, but there's also a lot of holes.
Such hubris! Human knowledge is not like Swiss (mostly known with a few gaps). Human knowledge is like a high-dimensional fractal broccoli: a stem of hard-won knowledge surrounded by a vast frontier of unknown. The hardest part of pushing on the frontier is deciding where to push. Deciding what to research requires taste.
> 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 the AI companies use today form a roadmap for what content is worth enough to not be pruned but paid for.
Would AI companies be willing to match that (even 50% match)? If not, we might just end up with low paid copyrighters / ghost writers churning out large amounts of content for LLMs in subject areas where they don't necessarily have expertise.
Honestly, this sounds like a Mozilla press release. The spin is absurd
Before ISPs existed, someone else paid. Universities, governments, selected corporations, etc.
After ISPs (post-UUNet), internet subscribers have always had to pay
Who finances the data collection, i.e., the transfer of data from/about subscribers to the so-called "tech" company for commercial exploitation. Hint: It is not the so-called "tech" companies
When I first accessed the internet, and later the www, the term "creators" was never used to describe people who used it
Methinks "creators" is SillyCon Valley speak for "unpaid independent contractors". Why not use the term "producers"
The gigantic websites comprised of other peoples' work, today's so-called "platforms", are not "creators", they produce nothing. Despite billions of dollars at their disposal, and vast amounts of published material, their production costs are small. This is because production costs are outsourced to unpaid independent contractors. The material the "platforms" publish does not belong to them, they are only third party intermediaries (middlemen)
In the original internet, people publishing on the internet via websites produced the website content themselves
Today, "platforms" are not creating anything except a baited trap for people using the internet, whether they are "creators" (producers) or consumers, where internet users can be spied on for advertising purposes. And the targets of this surveillance and subsequent targeted advertising will even pay for sending the surveillance data collected to the interlopers
Today's "creators" may be paid (if they are lucky, like winning a lottery) or not (the other 99%, their free contributions serve as bait). But "make no mistake", it is not the third party intermediary "platforms" that pay "creators", it is advertisers, but only after the "platforms" (middlemen) take a cut
SillyCon Valley calls this an "ecosystem". But today's internet, cf. the original one, IMHO looks more like a toxic waste dump
I don't fundamentally think that Cloudflare's view here is _wrong_ - by and large, when I google what internal temperature to cook pork to so I don't die, I'm not looking for an opinion or someone's life story - but I think I'm much more interested in how we create the weird niches that create the "knowledge" for the blender. Cloudflare alludes to it with the talk about Reddit and whatnot, but I'd love to know what the plan is to actually create and nurture those communities where people can really get weird into whatever topic they're interested in. Right now we're all sort of just ghettoized into various Facebook communities or whatever, but recreating an actual vibrant communal internet where people can find their weirdo subcultures and actually negotiate on some kind of reasonable footing with the LLM scrapers (who were the social network people, who were the search engine people, who have always been the ad people) would be a genuine improvement to the internet.
* read "hellish swamp diving affair"
The landlord of the marketplace should probably not dabble in the appraisal of products, whether for factuality or value.
This is the old "blockchains will create new niches for creators" / "rent-seeking is Good Actually" argument, barely reheated. Total imagination bankruptcy from C-suite.
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.
The new model will be something like:
1. A content creator creates a web site and uses Cloudflare.
2. AI companies pay Cloudflare to allow them to scrape content.
3. Cloudflare gives a cut to the content creator.
4. Users pay AI companies and get their questions answered.
A few observations/predictions:
* If this works, there will be competitors to Cloudflare (AWS, Microsoft, etc.) who will offer better terms to content creators. Content creators can then (easily) switch to whichever reverse-proxy has the best terms.
* Media companies will transform into Cloudflare competitors, aggregating content and monetizing by selling to AI. Their pitch will be that the content will be more curated than Cloudflare. Their brands might survive if the AIs pass the source of the content all the way to the user. For example, the AI says something like, "According to a BBC contributor....". Otherwise, media brands will no longer be known to consumers (only AI companies will care).
* If this works, AI companies will try to cut out the middle-man by building their own ecosystem of content creators.
* As more and more people get their answers directly from AI, it will be easier to sell content directly to AI companies. I.e., instead of publishing something on the open web and relying on Robots.txt to protect your content, you will sell content straight to the AI company. NOTE: If this happens, then the only way this will scale is if the AI itself decides which content it wants to buy for the next training run.
* At the limit, the web and everything about it basically disappears. Everyone gets their content directly from an AI and never visits a web site directly. Therefore, web sites disappear and all that's left is the HTTP protocol, which is used by AI clients to talk to the AI cloud.
Cloudflare blocks AI scrapers unless they pay the toll.
Edit: Re-read it and just noticed this:
> assuming the AI companies are willing to step up, support the ecosystem, and pay for the content that is the most valuable to them
Lolllllll. Y'all are gonna love my pitch for an airline startup. It begins, "assuming we can turn off gravity..."
Nobody at the head of these large tech firms has a clue about where this technology is heading.
The problem is the arguments they make for why this should happen are quite compelling, especially to those running sites (you'll see plenty of complaints on this forum about it), but theres also a large group of people who think information / code / data should be "free" (see open source code/maps/anything you can think off). So really its just a moral debate that will be lost in the interest of profit (which is ya know good n bad, if AI companies did more caching we probably wouldn't need this, but here we are).
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-ai-crawl-control/
ads have been the only micropayment
system that has worked
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?".
Now, the problem with micropayments gated sites is that you are trying to gate the exact thing that attracts people, so don't expect this business model to work.
Regulation.
Where would you go?
Because Visa & Mastercard are greedy dicks?
That said, the mental model that this article uses only recognizes that new content can fill in "holes" (interpolation). It also can expand the boundaries in new directions (extrapolation). That is a different and harder problem. If you distribute money to people "based on what most fills in the holes in the cheese", you really aren't expanding the boundaries of human knowledge as much as you are strengthening existing knowledge. They need to take boundary expansion into account here.
I also recognize that we know where the holes or boundaries are in many fields. They are "known unknowns". But this proposal does not take into account "unknown unknowns" --- things that we do not even realize that we don't know yet. It's going to be harder to incentive research into unknown unknowns when we don't even know what they are yet.
Many of us who use an ad blocker don't actually have a huge problem with ads. It's the tracking we object to.
I don't want Cloudflare to build an ad blocker, I want them to make a tracker blocker. Make surveillance so difficult and expensive and unreliable that companies stop doing it.
It sucks big time to live in an internet with cloudflare
You can block all websites using Cloudflare if you think it sucks.
(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, or for views. That way lies clickbait and content farms. The golden age of the Internet is one where people share information because they want to.
Source: https://1gn15.com/cloudflare
The bigger problem I see coming down the line, given the current business model for the internet, is what happens when investors need a return. When the LLM only provides one “correct” answer, the only way to make money from advertisers is to influence that answer. At least just now we are presented with information which we evaluate ourselves, though even this is subject to manipulation.
https://stratechery.com/2025/an-interview-with-cloudflare-fo...
Ok the the toxic nature of the internet and social media in general and what has become of our digital age, totally agree that it's rage and click bait. I wrote something to that effect here https://github.com/micro/mu/issues/27. But I personally don't think we're going to directly interact with agents the whole time. They will exist, they will be somewhere in the middle layers, there might even be a chat interface that replaces search queries with answers but I think the whole web as a whole and social media needs a rethink. Ads as a business model has to die, even though clearly it won't and we need to shift our attention elsewhere.
Examples:
Pingora claims to be battle-tested, but I have a hard time believing that it's to the same level of quality as whatever Cloudflare runs internally. https://github.com/cloudflare/pingora/issues/601
https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-oxy/ was not open source.
Small parts of Oxy were open sourced as "foundations" but the repo gives off the impression of a checkbox for someone rather than a serious commitment to building CF's own services on top of it — not "open, collaborative, standardized, and shared across many organizations".
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, for nothing other than the fun of it. In fact, the "vibrancy" of the internet appears to be inversely correlated to the number of people using it to generate a profit.
That's the "never been free" in that statement.
I don't think they're saying what you think they're saying.
The problem isnt oh no people wont be viewing ads and thus creators wont get paid. The problem is "why arent people who view these websites willing to pay?". So many subscriptions are like $5 a month but if we consider how much a creator is paid for showing you an ad its like 0.0005 cents. I'd rather pay that everytime i view a page than look at ads or have cloudflare pay people to create the content openAI thinks I want.
Funding the content we consume should be cheap considering how many people are there consuming it and how cheap it is these days to serve content.
> What's most interesting is what content companies are getting the best deals. It's not the ragebait headline writers. It's not the news organizations writing yet another take on what's going on in politics. It's not the spammy content farms full of drivel. Instead, it's Reddit and other quirky corners that best remind us of the Internet of old. For those of you old enough, think back to the Internet not of the last 15 years but of the last 35. We’ve lost some of what made that early Internet great, but there are indications that we might finally have the incentives to bring more of it back.
> It seems increasingly likely that in our future, AI-driven Internet — assuming the AI companies are willing to step up, support the ecosystem, and pay for the content that is the most valuable to them — it’s the creative, local, unique, original content that’ll be worth the most. And, if you’re like us, the thing you as an Internet consumer are craving more of is creative, local, unique, original content. And, it turns out, having talked with many of them, that’s the content that content creators are most excited to create.
Imagine a future where:
The Internet rewards passionate creators more than instrumental alpha-seekers. This is key. But how?
We publish everything for free under reciprocal licenses like the AGPL and CC-BY-SA, not permissive licenses like the MIT and CC-BY. Those who take from the pile must add to it, or at least not claim it as exclusively their own.
Creators are rewarded by the populace via direct payments, like how streamers are rewarded. People decide what's valuable and what's slop, not Big Brother.
This creates an incentive structure where:
Those who make software and content because they love it will have more resources to make more quality stuff.
Those who make software and content for the money but actually hate what they do will find something else to do because companies will pay them less.
There are two necessary conditions that must be met, that we can work on right now:
We recognize artificial scarcity as evil, so we can enforce reciprocal licenses socially and bypass the broken legal apparatus.
We use multiple competing payment platforms to pay creators and receive payments, so there is incentive for these platforms to get better.
Reminds me of that bit of Snow Crash, where the freelancers sell data to the Library of Congress.
What CF didn't address is how the smallest content creators are going to be "making deals" with the Answer Engines. They aren't.
Even if some system of making crawlers pay for a content access, how could you be sure it's never used without your permission? It's not like DRM solved internet piracy.
And even if a technical solution were possible, it's natural to see this level of cynicism of how an internet giant would handle it.
Yeah right, most of it is now proxied in cleartext through them!
I'm not sure why there would be an expectation from most users that AI should compensate creators.
Kudos to CF for pointing out the dips in the road ahead. A big, juicy problem to tackle.
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 human knowledge". We all know that is not what sells, and that the opposite of this will continue to inundate the infosphere.
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.
This discussion is going to be rife with the pot calling the kettle black as people who have blocked every ad for the last 15 years call out AI for not compensating creators...
Jesus Christ I knew when I clicked on this link it was going to be corporate propaganda which pushes a specific narrative favorable to their business model, but this is just wrong.
It's one thing to say that online content has always relied on having somebody to foot the bill for infrastructure if the content can't offset that overhead itself but they're just lying as if none of those forums, IRC rooms and crazy geocities/angelfire webrings ever existed. As if there is nothing on the internet today which exists for its own sake rather than as the outcome of a creator's profit-motive.
(https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastWeek&page=0&prefix=tru...)
What could possibly go wrong?
I don’t know if I see a company extracting rent from other people as a win…
Creators should be able to trace and quantify exactly what data of theirs was fed into the grift machine and be reimbursed directly by the grift machine custodian each time their data is used to generate new output.
A middleman who collects a giant chunk of creator royalties, for data that will be used perpetually by the grift machine... that sounds like a bad deal.
So, same as it is today.
I think what Cloudflare is advocating for is preservation of a “public+Ads” bundle where ads are viewed by a human. So they want to disentangle a computer reading something (the core premise of the internet) from a human putting eyes on it.
I wouldn’t mind see a world in which more content is private and the creator can decide how to monetize. It feels like Cloudflare stepping in to say public != public is an overreach.
* 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.
> What's most interesting is what content companies are getting the best deals. It's not the ragebait headline writers. It's not the news organizations writing yet another take on what's going on in politics. It's not the spammy content farms full of drivel. Instead, it's Reddit and other quirky corners that best remind us of the Internet of old.
Removing all the vibrant parts is long due, apparently :')
I'm always fascinated by companies capacity to make deregulation the answer to every problem, included deregulation. Neoliberalism never fails to make me cringe, the idea that any value comes as a direct consequence of the business model is not surprising coming from tech companies but still.
> So how will the business model work? [...] Imagine a future business model of the Internet that doesn't reward traffic-generating [...] but instead rewards those content creators [...]. That will involve some portion of the subscription fees AI companies collect, and some portion of the revenue from the ads they'll inevitably serve, going back to content creators ...
This isn't revolutionary and won't remove the biggest issues with the internet, This is basically how youtube remunerates content creators, that counts AI using your data as a "view" or remunerable unit of consumption.
AI companies will never agree to remunerate anyone without a fight. They spent billions on their AI models and want ROI.
Remember how youtube demonetises content with not 'advertiser friendly' content ? is that how the whole internet works now ? can i get removed from the internet if Trump affiliated CEOs hate me ?
> Our conversations with the leading AI companies nearly all acknowledge that they have a responsibility to give back to the ecosystem and compensate content creators. Confirming this, the largest publishers are reporting they're having much more constructive conversations about licensing their content to those AI companies.
So, pretty transparently, you make content, that content is owned by a publisher, that publisher gives that content to an AI company, the AI company pays back the publisher (how things already work so far), and then the publisher aggrees to give some of it back to the creators. How does cloudflare plan to promise this ? they mention "collaboration" so non binding agreements, as i assume OpenAI won't agree to pay fines to cloudflare for not paying you the 20 bucks you think you deserve for your content.
At no point do they even entertain the idea that you should be remunerated based on how often AI serves your content, or that this remuneration should be mendatory.
This letter would create incredible opportunities for censorship and abuse. Just a few days after Trump makes companies pull Jimmy and Stephen, Cloudflare propose a new internet, controlled by them, centralized in america, where Trump, or any future president could just order Wikipedia to be removed or demonetized. No thanks
- "Foundation", Isaac Asimov
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...
If the open internet is already dead (and it is already dead), it’s better to accept that reality and silo off the good parts behind paywalls so that people can get paid, rather than to let bad people benefit massively from it while they build their walled gardens. This has been a long time coming.
Fantastic! I wish I could undermine their clickbait business model even more..
> But there’s reason for optimism
You mean Cloudflare being investigated for antitrust?