Cloudflare's CEO recently floated the idea of a service to block AI companies that scrape media content without compensation. It's an intriguing and possibly useful idea, and one that they could probably pull off to some degree. I didn't see this brief interview anywhere else so...
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7287149126188691458/
Anyway, this idea is interesting coming from CF because their CEO has long argued that it doesn't want to be in the anti-abuse business absent a court order, as anything less amounts to a slippery slope of censorship. But as long as the CEO is talking about being the arbiter of good and bad, how about we start with something more prosaic, like making it easier for people to decide what parts of CF's network they don't want to see at all.
BTW, Cloudflare's mantra is that they don't "host" content in the conventional sense, but rather they are a pass-through that caches content in multiple places to make it more quickly and globally available. At the same time, their mantra on abuse has always been that selectively booting bad customers without a court order is akin to censorship, i.e. their being able to decide whether some content deserves to be online or not.
But here's the truth: Even if CF were to boot a site off its network, that doesn't "censor" the booted property, which will still have its content served from the original location. And this is why I find their argument for not doing more so disingenuous.
BrianKrebs
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2025-01-26 16:06:51 UTC
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2025-01-26 16:06:51 UTCEvent JSON
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