zlacker

>>meetpa+(OP)
I've noticed that in recent months, even apart from these outages, cloudflare has been contributing to a general degradation and shittification of the internet. I'm seeing a lot more "prove you're human", "checking to make sure you're human", and there is normally at the very least a delay of a few seconds before the site loads.

I don't think this is really helping the site owners. I suspect it's mainly about AI extortion:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-pay-per-crawl/

>>cpncru+Qo
the two things are unrelated...

The pay-per-crawl thing, is about them thinking ahead about post-AI business/revenue models.

The way AI happened, it removed a big chunk of revenue from news companies, blogs, etc. Because lots of people go to AI instead of reaching the actual 3rd party website.

AI currently gets the content for free from the 3rd party websites, but they have revenue from their users.

So Cloudflare is proposing that AI companies should be paying for their crawling. Cloudflare's solution would give the lost revenue back where it belongs, just through a different mechanism.

The ugly side of the story is that this was already an existing solution, and open source, called L402.org.

Cloudflare wants to be the first to take a piece of the pie, but also instead of using the open source version, they forked it internally and published it as their own service, which is cloudflare specific.

To be completely fair, the l402 requires you to solve the payment mechanism itself, which for Cloudflare is easy because they already deal with payments.