As an (at least aspiring) high-end content producer on the interwebs, I found this episode of No Priors with Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince to be a welcome shot of optimism in a sea of AI doomerism around content production.
The gist of the episode is that the historical social contract of the web is breaking down. Content-producers used to produce content, and Google would route them traffic which could then be monetized by ads or merch or just plain clout. Increasingly though, AI models mine the content and provide derivative answers to users without routing any traffic back to users or even attribution.
Obviously, this new status quo significantly reduces the incentives to provide new content, something which, in the long term, will also impact model performance.
Cloudflare's unique position may enable it to enforce a new status quo: one which provides more granular permissions to content creators around who can view their content and at what price (e.g. humans view for free, but bots have to pay).
This identity layer is something the crypto world has spent a lot of time thinking about with networks like World being the most notable examples, but perhaps Cloudflare's existing position at the network's edge puts it in a very unique position to enforce a new social contract on today's rails: one which creates a market for truly novel human knowledge creation online.
The old world of Google indexing the internet and routing traffic will die a slow death. We have a chance to rethink monetization online - one in which markets are likely to be a better solution for content creators as opposed to regulatory protection (unlikely to hold up under fair use).
In an optimistic scenario, this will be a market that stops rewarding dopamine and outrage and starts rewarding truly novel forms of human knowledge which, in turn, fill in the gaps of foundational models.
Like Kevin Lu's latest essay, I wonder if Cloudflare is in a position to enforce a globally, distributed version of scale AI / surge AI. Perhaps the future of the web is internet scale markets for truly novel human knowledge; something I think we can all get behind.
