A New Internet Business Model?

Overall reaction to the letter

• Many see the piece as long, vague, and light on specifics; several say it “doesn’t actually describe a business model,” just aspirations.
• Headings are criticized as uninformative and disconnected from the paragraphs; the writing is compared to corporate fluff or PR.
• A minority appreciates that Cloudflare is at least engaging with the “how do AI and creators get paid?” question and finds the vision interesting, if underdeveloped.

Cloudflare’s proposed ‘new’ model

• Core idea as inferred by commenters:
  • Site uses Cloudflare.
  • Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default.
  • AI companies pay Cloudflare (“pay per crawl”) for access.
  • Cloudflare shares some of that revenue with site owners.
• Some tie this to earlier announced “AI crawl control” and 402-based payment schemes, similar to L402 and other crawler-auth standards.

Gatekeeping, monopoly, and “middleman-as-a-service”

• Many describe this as Cloudflare trying to become a tollbooth or payment rail for the web, analogous to an App Store or protection racket.
• Concern: huge existing share of reverse-proxy/CDN traffic gives them outsized leverage; adding payment control could turn them into a de facto gatekeeper.
• Others argue competitors (Akamai, Fastly, cloud providers) can implement similar controls, so it’s not technically a hard monopoly—just worrisome centralization.

Creators, scraping, and compensation

• Some publishers and engineers like the idea of residual payments from AI scrapers and mention parallel efforts (RSL, IAB working groups).
• Others say: if you publish publicly, you can’t complain when machines read it; wanting to charge AI but not humans is framed as greed or artificial scarcity.
• Strong pushback on Cloudflare’s claim that there has “always” been a reward system: people recall hobbyist forums, personal sites, and wikis built for fun, not profit.
• There’s fear that big platforms and rights-holders will capture most revenue, as with music streaming or app stores, leaving small creators with pennies.

Impact on the open internet and content quality

• Critics see this as accelerating “enshittification”: more rent-seeking, new SEO-like arms races, and AI-shaped demand leading creators to “fill holes in the cheese” rather than pursue genuine interests.
• Worry that using LLMs to define knowledge “gaps” will bias what gets funded, neglecting boundary-pushing or “unknown unknowns.”
• Some argue the real loss is the older, weirder, self-hosted web; others note home hosting is already constrained by ISPs, security, and discoverability, with tools like Cloudflare’s tunnels seen as deepening rather than reversing centralization.