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Cloudflare To The AI Industry: Time To Pay Up!
There are precious few companies in the tech world that are willing to stick their necks out and “do the right thing,” and even fewer who both operate at Internet scale and enjoy Wall Street’s unabashed fandom.
In fact, I can only think of one: Cloudflare. And today, the $65 billion public company* announced a new policy that has the potential to tilt the balance of the Internet back toward the little guys. Starting this morning, Cloudflare will automatically block AI crawlers from copying the content of every website the company protects. And it’s doing it for free.
“We’re changing the rules of the internet across all of Cloudflare,” Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO, told The New York Times. “If you’re a robot, now you have to go on the toll road in order to get the content of all of these publishers.”
Cloudflare’s scale — it powers more than 20 percent of the Internet — and its financial profile has consistently allowed it to reimagine how the Web can and should work. Without fear or favor, the company has rolled out services that reset the economics and data practices governing our day to day interactions with the Internet. Most of these services fall into the “dull but important” category, things like domain registration, the Domain Name System, or peering and streaming networks. Each move has been marked by a…
