[troyvit]

As an actual content provider I see this as an opportunity. We pay our journalists real money to write real stories. If AI results haven't started affecting our search traffic they will start to soon. Up until now we've had two choices: block AI-based crawlers and fall completely out of that market, or continue to let AI companies train off of our hard-won content and take it as a loss that still generates a little bit of traffic. Cloudflare now offers a third option if we can figure out how to use it.

Dissing on Cloudflare is the new thing, and I get it. They're big and powerful and they influence a massive amount of the traffic on the web. Like the saying goes though, don't blame the player, blame the game. Ask yourself if you'd rather have Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon or Apple in their place, because probably one of them would be.

[sangnoir]

> If AI results haven't started affecting our search traffic they will start to soon. Up until now we've had two choices: block AI-based crawlers and fall completely out of that market, or continue to let AI companies train off of our hard-won content and take it as a loss that still generates a little bit of traffic

You have another option, one that iFixit chose: poison[1] the data sent to AI crawlers, you may even use GenAI to generate the fake content for maximum efficiency.

1. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Data+Connector++Replacement/147...

[johnklos]

> don't blame the player, blame the game

You make it sound like this is OK. "It's not their fault that a protection racket didn't already exist. They just filled the market's need for one."

[troyvit]

I do hate it whenever somebody says that line to me, because it's up to the player to choose if they want to play, and that automatically puts them in a certain bucket.

I believe the game is rigged from the get-go. Nobody should be able to get that big without having a level of accountability that matches their size, and our current economic system doesn't support that. That's why X can go one way with content moderation, Meta another, etc. and whole countries get pissed off. That's why I hate the game. The players have scaled past it.

Web infrastructure is headed in that direction more and more too. I personally think that for all their reach and influence Cloudflare does a great job protecting the internet, but that can change at any time and it would be in nobody's control but Cloudflare's. For now I'm glad it's them and not AWS or Alphabet. I don't know how I'll feel in five years.

[neilv]

Not dissing any company; just pointing out a real concern to be considered, in this freshly disrupted and rapidly evolving environment.

We all know that someone is going to try to slip one past the regulators, and they're probably on HN, and we know from the past that this can pay off hugely for them.

Maybe, this time, the HN people who grumble about past exploiters and abusers in retrospect, can be more proactive, and help inform lawmakers and regulators in time.

And for those of us who don't want to be activists, but also don't want to be abusers -- just run honest businesses -- we're reminded to think twice about what we do and how we do it, when we're operating in what seems like novel space.