Content creators have found a new superhero in Cloudflare and the good news is that it already handles around 20 % of all internet traffic.
Before we go any further, I recommend watching the Cloudflare chief executive’s talk at Cannes, where he describes generative AI for what it is: an “existential threat” to content creators, backed up by his own stark figures: “A decade ago, Google answered 25 % of queries directly; six months ago that rose to 75 %; today it is probably 90 %.”
Why is Cloudflare the new hero? For some time the company has made it easy to block AI firms’ crawlers and even launched a pay-for-crawl service called AI Audit; now it has announced that blocking will be switched on by default for new accounts, a move that has sparked controversy.
And while it blocks, Cloudflare is proposing something revolutionary: pay-per-crawl. The new product lets every website set its own fee and receive payment when its content is trawled to feed an insatiable AI. Total control sits in the Cloudflare dashboard, where AI companies can view the rates and choose whether or not to pay them.
At last, someone is siding with creators and journalists instead of hiding behind a so-called “fair use” that is anything but fair, allowing entire sites to be scraped and regurgitated by AI interfaces in a way that disguises outright theft. The worst offender, by far, is Google, which once again abuses its dominant position and has yet to offer a fair-compensation scheme for content creators.
Cloudflare has declared 1 July to be Content Independence Day. Google has broken the tacit pact between itself and content creators, changing the web for ever; unless we act, we shall no longer receive the traffic we used to. The best option — as CMS MAG has argued from the outset — is to block first and think later. AI firms must be starved of their coveted free fuel and forced to start paying. Some creators are already demanding payment in the courts, with mixed results: AI firms are innocent until proven otherwise, and plagiarism can be hard to prove.
Cloudflare’s idea is to value content not by the traffic it generates but by its quality, although the company admits it has yet to determine exactly how. “Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better internet. I am proud of the part we play as the web evolves, and proud that we are helping content creators defend their position and demand fair value for the work they laboured so hard to produce. Happy Content Independence Day!” concludes Matthew Prince on the Cloudflare blog.
* Original article written in Spanish, translated with chatGPT and reviewed in English by Jorge Mediavilla.
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