Charge site owners to protect the site from aggressive crawlers, charge crawlers/agents to bypass the protection. Like a good old fashioned protection racket

That's not what protection racket means. Cloudflare isn't the one building LLMs and scraping websites.

I guess it would be if Cloudflare was operating the bots.

Usually the protection racket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket) is when the people who will cause the destruction charge to prevent it from happening.

Paying a security guard isn't considered a protection racket, while paying a member of the mob so that nothing happens to my store is considered a protection racket.

What do you call it when the same security guard also gets paid by the attackers to let them in?

Charge crawlers and pay site owners, and take a cut of course

Thanks for the tl;dr . Why is this blog post so long? Will they charge per token?

I think they're alluding to their already-announced scheme which will charge parasitic crawlers an entry fee for safe passage past their filters.

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/paypercrawl-signup/

Cloudflare has controls already in their dashboard for controlling whether LLMs should be denied responses when querying your site. How they intend to broker payments and selective access isn’t really clear, but you can stop giving your content away for free if you’d like.

You create content and gate it behind Cloudflare.

Cloudflare blocks AI scrapers unless they pay the toll.

Yeah, I was waiting for "how are they going to shove AI into this?" and boom there it is halfway down the page. No content here (obvious problem: how does paying Reddit Inc to allow scraping result in money going to the person who created the content? shrug). Just more AI hype to get investor cash before the bubble bursts. Woopie.

Edit: Re-read it and just noticed this:

> assuming the AI companies are willing to step up, support the ecosystem, and pay for the content that is the most valuable to them

Lolllllll. Y'all are gonna love my pitch for an airline startup. It begins, "assuming we can turn off gravity..."

If Cloudflare demonstrates it can reliably distinguish AI scraper traffic from human traffic, then they will be able to force AI companies to step up, no assumption necessary. Still a big if, but (this one clause you quoted notwithstanding) it doesn't read to me like they're relying on the goodwill of AI companies.

Waiting for the day when I can cash out my reddit karma for USD

I think they all know where it is heading and it is massively less money for everyone. Every technical breakthrough doesn't mean more profit for everyone and nor should it. Sometimes it's just a dishwasher or washing machine, something that frees up the bulk of humanity from something that is drudgery. Whether we actually get those benefits from AI remains to be seen.

Its cloudflare trying to enshittify the internet with micro transactions[0] and take their N% cut (of course it will start at like 2% but ask any uber driver how thats going).

The problem is the arguments they make for why this should happen are quite compelling, especially to those running sites (you'll see plenty of complaints on this forum about it), but theres also a large group of people who think information / code / data should be "free" (see open source code/maps/anything you can think off). So really its just a moral debate that will be lost in the interest of profit (which is ya know good n bad, if AI companies did more caching we probably wouldn't need this, but here we are).

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-ai-crawl-control/