> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare.

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?