Man, HN is sleeping on this right now. This is huge. 20% of the web is behind Cloudflare. What if this was extended to all customers, even the millions of free ones? Would be really amazing to get paid to use Cloudflare as a blog owner, for example
And of course it will eventually be rolled out for everyone, meaning there will be a Cloudflare-Net (where you only can read if you give Cloudflare your credit card number), and then successively more competing infrastructure services (Akamai, AWS, ... meaning we get into a fractured marketplace kind of situation, similar to how you need dozens of streaming abos to watch "everything").
For AI, it will make crawling more expensive for the large guys and lead to higher costs for AI users - which means all of us - while at the same time making it harder for smaller companies to start something new, innovative. And it will make information less available on AI models.
Finally, there’s a parallel here to the net neutrality debate: once access becomes conditional on payment or corporate gatekeeping, the original openness of the web erodes.
This is not the good news for netizens it sounds like.
There exists a strong sense of doing the thing that is healthiest for the Internet over what is the most profit-extractive, even when the cost may be high to do so or incentives great to choose otherwise. This is true for work I've been involved with as well as seeing the decisions made by other teams.
I worry about what happens someday when leadership changes and the priority becomes value extraction rather than creation, if that makes sense. We've seen it so many times with so many other tech companies, it's difficult to believe it won't happen to Cloudflare at some point.
So one better makes sure that it has not the potential to further introduce gatekeepers, where later such gatekeepers will realize that, in order to continue to live, they need to make a profit over everything else, and then everything is out of the window.
It's basically creating a "get paid to spam the internet with anything" system.