I am not an expert, and my tiny website carries no advertising, but I get the impression that Cloudflare is trying to supplant Google as Internet Gatekeeper rather than acting as a guardian angel for =>big<= content creators.
For one thing, Google has been scraping website content for a long time, well before the advent of AI; the Schema project was launched 15 years ago by Bing, Google, and Yahoo. To achieve a good ranking in search results, webmasters had to rewrite almost all their content to make it understandable to Google's computer systems.
Back in 2015, Google also partnered with big content creators like Twitter to replicated their content. The concept was quite similar to what Cloudflare is proposing today. Publishers eventually left in droves two years ago.
Furthermore, the fundamental question is: who controls access to the Web now, Google or Cloudflare?
Neither option is truly satisfactory. If Cloudflare ultimately comes out on top, the scenario will repeat itself: the company will seek to extract more revenue from its partners, who will eventually leave.
Yes but it’s what they want (being scraped by AIs), it’s written:
>Still, its monetization strategy going forward as it relates to AI will come from licensing agreements, which the company has struck with Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, among others. Google, unlike its hyperscaler peers or pure-play AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, has not struck any licensing deals with any publishers.
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>As a result, USA Today Inc. is prepared to delist from Google in the next six to twelve months, according to Reed. Likewise, the creator network Beehiiv announced in a recent partnership with Cloudflare that its network of creators now has the ability to block the Google crawler.
I am not an expert, and my tiny website carries no advertising, but I get the impression that Cloudflare is trying to supplant Google as Internet Gatekeeper rather than acting as a guardian angel for =>big<= content creators.
For one thing, Google has been scraping website content for a long time, well before the advent of AI; the Schema project was launched 15 years ago by Bing, Google, and Yahoo. To achieve a good ranking in search results, webmasters had to rewrite almost all their content to make it understandable to Google's computer systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schema.org
Back in 2015, Google also partnered with big content creators like Twitter to replicated their content. The concept was quite similar to what Cloudflare is proposing today. Publishers eventually left in droves two years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages
Furthermore, the fundamental question is: who controls access to the Web now, Google or Cloudflare?
Neither option is truly satisfactory. If Cloudflare ultimately comes out on top, the scenario will repeat itself: the company will seek to extract more revenue from its partners, who will eventually leave.
This will acheive nothing, they will get ai scraped like the rest of us.
Yes but it’s what they want (being scraped by AIs), it’s written:
>Still, its monetization strategy going forward as it relates to AI will come from licensing agreements, which the company has struck with Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon, among others. Google, unlike its hyperscaler peers or pure-play AI firms like OpenAI and Anthropic, has not struck any licensing deals with any publishers. > >As a result, USA Today Inc. is prepared to delist from Google in the next six to twelve months, according to Reed. Likewise, the creator network Beehiiv announced in a recent partnership with Cloudflare that its network of creators now has the ability to block the Google crawler.