[vogu66]

> Not mentioned: there would be a single gatekeeper for the internet, Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is already a monopoly though. From what I can tell, what they are saying here, besides proclaiming their continued existence, is that they and AI companies and content creators need the internet to exist.

And what they are building is on top of the 402 response, which anyone can use? So you could use that without using any CDN at all, without too much development cost?

[visarga]

They are all platforms: news companies, publishing houses, ISPs, recording labels, YouTube, Google, Meta, TikTok, Windows, App Store, Play Store, Amazon.. and as platforms they squeeze both the layer above and the one below, their customers and their providers.

You know what that looks like? rent. It looks like home owners setting rent as high as the market can bear, until it becomes almost no advantage at all to participate.

It sure looks like Cloudflare wants to be the platform for AI royalty collections. But creators, customers, sellers - they are all hostage to the platforms they can't avoid. That is where the money sink is.

[acdha]

How is Cloudflare a monopoly as opposed to just being popular? The CDN, security, edge compute, etc. markets all have multiple popular competitors.

[vogu66]

Sorry, not exactly monopoly. Probably too big to fail, from what I gather, though. I don't know enough to know whether there is anyone else that could realistically compete with their scale.

My point was simply that their size is unrelated to this proposition, outside the fact they are big enough to be taken seriously.