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Cloudflare’s Troubling Shift From Guardian to Gatekeeper

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Cloudflare’s Troubling Shift From Guardian to Gatekeeper

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This piece originally appeared in Tech Policy Press.

Last year, the internet infrastructure and cybersecurity behemoth Cloudflare launched a new “easy button” intended to allow websites to “declare their AIndependence” by blocking all AI bots with a single click. Now, the company is doubling down on this approach by “changing the default to block AI crawlers unless they pay creators for their content,” in effect becoming the new toll operator for the web. Cloudflare presents this as a boon for creators, promising to protect content from unauthorized scraping and giving website owners control over how their data is used. The idea is to simply, as CEO Matthew Prince said in a recent interview, “change the way the internet works.”

But the fact that a single company, one which controls over 82 percent of the global market for DDoS and bot protection software, is making such a move is a deeply troubling development. It capitalizes on fear of a new technology to undermine the very principles of the open internet. It threatens to entrench the power of incumbents by centralizing control and reinforcing digital walled gardens.

By making it trivially easy to paywall the entire internet, Cloudflare effectively fragments the web into sealed-off silos, undermining the openness that has driven decades of online innovation and knowledge-sharing. Perhaps more importantly, this one-click blockade raises serious competition concerns. It positions Cloudflare as a central arbiter of what information flows on the internet. Rather than one company dictating how web crawling and content access should work, we should be doubling down on open, community-driven solutions to give both creators and crawlers more balanced control.

Continue reading in Tech Policy Press.

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