CloudFlare To The AI Industry: Pay Up!

Cloudflare founders Matthew Prince and Michelle Zatlyn from a 2015 SXSW presentation (image)

There are precious few companies in the tech world that are willing to stick their necks out and “do the right thing,” and even fewer who both operate at Internet scale and enjoy Wall Street’s unabashed fandom.

In fact, I can only think of one: Cloudflare. And today, the $65 billion public company* announced a new policy that has the potential to tilt the balance of the Internet back toward the little guys. Starting this morning, Cloudflare will automatically block AI crawlers from copying the content of every website the company protects. And it’s doing it for free.

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Sure, The Internet Is Broken. So Let’s Go Fix It, Shall We?

Originally published on NewCo Shift, April 1, 2018.

With the launch of 1.1.1.1, Cloudflare thumbs its nose at ISPs and the big platforms (AKA Google), and once again declares itself a business willing to start, and lead, tech’s toughest conversations

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince (Image)

Over the past year Cloudflare became best known not for the impressive services it has built in the Internet networking space, but for an action taken by its CEO Matthew Prince during the swirl following Trump’s Charlottesville comments. After initially defending the free speech rights of its neo-Nazi customer The Daily Stormer, Prince finally had enough. When the site claimed Cloudflare secretly supported its hateful philosophy, Prince kicked the site off the company’s network.

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