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I don't trust Cloudflare but this is not a problem they created. They solved a real problem with DDoS protection in the beginning and now AI crawlers increasing server cost is not a negligible problem. The CEO of iFixit called out Anthropic publicly for hitting their site a million times in 24 hours to scrape it. We are passed the point of good faith action from these AI companies. They are adversarial and need to be treated as such.

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But they do create this problem. They could have specifically defaulted to not blanketing RSS feeds and other M2M specific pages. Instead, we are now in a situation where even daring to look at robots.txt can flag you as a bot.

True. For all those people who want to make excuses for Cloudflare, it's an excellent reminder that they've known about this problem for years and they still haven't fixed it.

Are they inept? Or do they really only care about things that bring them profit and that normalize their marginalization of non-paying groups? Which explanation makes the most sense?

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