Cloudflare and "pay per crawl"
“For years the internet’s grandees have presided over what Yanis Varoufakis brands a realm of “cloud fiefdoms”, where platform owners exact rents and users labour for likes and pennies. Media scholar Nathan Schneider goes further, noting that most online forums whether a Discord server or a subreddit, default to “implicit feudalism”, (h/t to Jonathan Bellack) in which unelected moderators rule by fiat and disgruntled peasants can only decamp elsewhere…
Generative-AI firms have reinforced this order. Their giant models were trained on billions of web pages, scraped with scant regard for copyright or recompense. Bill Ready likens the practice to the file-sharing free-for-all of the Napster era.”
