[kvam]

Why would cloudflare be the company to do this?

[noir_lord]

Rent 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]

But of all the players, Cloudflare is the best one for this kind of thing.

[rozenmd]

Curious: how do you feel about AWS, Azure, GCP?

[acdha]

Their 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.

[Cupprum]

At 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?

[SXX]

MiTM is their business. Obviously mitming of financial transactions is the most profitable business of all.

[thrown-0825-1]

I dunno, running for president of the US and launching a crypto coin seems pretty profitable.

[unglaublich]

Because they are establishing themselves as "the gatekeeper of the internet".

[miohtama]

Because their customers want to monetize AI crawlers

[jbverschoor]

Finally build an infrastructure for real micro transactions. First for AI agents to access paid content, then for consumer to access content.

[thrown-0825-1]

So they can directly monetize page views with their own token and fully embrace the role of internet gatekeeper / tax man.

[Spivak]

But 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.

[spwa4]

... 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.

[h33t-l4x0r]

Their 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]

Google search is used more now than ever…

[mapmeld]

I 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]

They 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.