3 ms·
Why would cloudflare be the company to do this?
by kvam 1y ago
Why would cloudflare be the company to do this?
- Cupprum 1y agoAt 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?
- unglaublich 1y agoBecause they are establishing themselves as "the gatekeeper of the internet".
- SXX 1y agoMiTM is their business. Obviously mitming of financial transactions is the most profitable business of all.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoI dunno, running for president of the US and launching a crypto coin seems pretty profitable.
- noir_lord 1y agoRent 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.
- deadbabe 1y agoBut of all the players, Cloudflare is the best one for this kind of thing.
- rozenmd 1y agoCurious: how do you feel about AWS, Azure, GCP?
- octo888 1y agoYou work for Cloudflare, so is your comment more a "we're no different" statement than genuine curiosity about their opinion?
- rozenmd 1y agoGenuinely curious.
- noir_lord 1y agoSame way I do about any large corporation, I don't trust them.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoYou mean Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet?
- willtemperley 1y agoCF: 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.
- mapmeld 1y agoI 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?
- rjh29 1y agoThey 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.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoSo they can directly monetize page views with their own token and fully embrace the role of internet gatekeeper / tax man.
- spwa4 1y ago... 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.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agorule of law no longer exists in the US and their large corporations are filling the gap.
- Spivak 1y agoBut 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.
- thrown-0825-1 1y agoLess regulation to get in the way of the blatant corruption.
- h33t-l4x0r 1y agoTheir 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.
- aiisthefiture 1y agoGoogle search is used more now than ever…
- ACCount37 1y agoWhat 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.
- jbverschoor 1y agoFinally build an infrastructure for real micro transactions. First for AI agents to access paid content, then for consumer to access content.
- miohtama 1y agoBecause their customers want to monetize AI crawlers
- acdha 1y agoTheir 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.