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Comment by kvam | Hacker News Reader

Why would cloudflare be the company to do this?

Rent seeking probably.

Cloudflare sits in the middle of a vast amount of web traffic now, offering easy global payments and skimming off the top of that is going to be very profitable potentially.

I don't trust Cloudflare, the larger they get the bigger the abuse potential becomes.

Curious: how do you feel about AWS, Azure, GCP?

You work for Cloudflare, so is your comment more a "we're no different" statement than genuine curiosity about their opinion?

Genuinely curious.

Same way I do about any large corporation, I don't trust them.

You mean Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet?

CF: No criminal convictions I know about. No reason to distrust yet. Most controversies seem to be about providing services to political organisations.

GCP: Earth Engine is quite good, but Google have multiple criminal convictions. As a repeat offender they should be avoided at all costs. They are just so exceptionally good at manipulating people, markets and academia it's genuinely terrifying.

Azure: Microsoft still don't take security seriously. They're just a bit bumbly, not really smart enough to be as terrifying as Google.

AWS: Pretty useful, annoying to use, distrust because I can't bear Amazon's use of dark patterns in consumer products.

But of all the players, Cloudflare is the best one for this kind of thing.

Their customers pay them to be the front door to their websites. Customers want a way to reduce the massive traffic from AI crawling, to block malicious traffic, and to be compensated for access.

That leaves Cloudflare well positioned to implement a pay-for-access check along with all of the existing bot services they offer. AI crawling goes from a threat to a win if I can serve OpenAI a demand to pay for each request. Bot abuse goes down if traffic isn’t free. Businesses like journalism become stable again if readers pay for content rather than relying on advertisers to subsidize it.

At least its not facebook or microsoft.

But the better question would be, who should be the company (or entity) we should trust to do such a thing?

MiTM is their business. Obviously mitming of financial transactions is the most profitable business of all.

I dunno, running for president of the US and launching a crypto coin seems pretty profitable.

Because they are establishing themselves as "the gatekeeper of the internet".

Because their customers want to monetize AI crawlers

Finally build an infrastructure for real micro transactions. First for AI agents to access paid content, then for consumer to access content.

So they can directly monetize page views with their own token and fully embrace the role of internet gatekeeper / tax man.

... which will then be immediately destroyed by law because it gives the actual tax man a single target, along with a money flow that comes from within the control of the tax man.

PLUS just imagine how many corrupt politicians will be tempted to force these payments to go through their company.

rule of law no longer exists in the US and their large corporations are filling the gap.

But then why do a blockchain thing? Why not just make CloudflareBucks they centrally control? Surely that is much easier to monetize and cheaper to implement.

Less regulation to get in the way of the blatant corruption.

Their customers are hit the hardest by the shift away from google search to AI. They probably are the right company to try to help them monetize their content.

Google search is used more now than ever…

What does the traffic from Google Search look like though?

I can't imagine all the low effort content farms that were providing things like dictionary definitions or ridiculously elongated ad-stuffed versions of kitchen recipes are doing too hot under the pressure from AI Overviews. And they can't be the only ones impacted.

I agree this makes little sense for Cloudflare to jump on the crypto bandwagon now. Maybe they want to retain some talent by turning this into an official project.

Is the premise that it makes more sense for an AI agent to pay in prepurchased stablecoin tokens instead of direct access to a credit card?

They are the moat between AI content crawlers and websites. They will probably start charging a fee and a stablecoin is a good way to do that globally.

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