The business model of the web was killing itself long before AI showed up.<p>Read the UN report on the Attention Economy from 2 years ago - <a href="https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_feb.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/attention_economy_...</a><p>It says a simple thing - Content has vastly exceeded Eyeballs and Time available to consume it all.<p>So what happens when Supply exceeds Demand by a huge margin?<p>Attention Economy CEOs (basically the monopoly platforms) have handled this question by doing a fantastic job convincing Content Creators if your content is not getting eyeballs either something is wrong with you, OR you got to pay us more for Reach and Visibility/buy more ads/produce more engaging garbage. If its engaging we will take a cut. If its not, pay us to get the algo to prop you up.<p>This is a parasitic model which is eating itself.
AI is (potentially) killing Cloudflare's business model. If it transitions to push (where you have to get your content into LLM models if you want users to see it) from pull (where users pull it with browsers and find it with search engines), this is not good for what Cloudflare offers.<p>Do I want to rely on search engines? Or do I want to live within the Anthropic or ChatGPT client with everything at my fingertips it has trained on (as well as tooling access via the MCP ecosystem)? Desktop->Browser->AI terminal is the rough story arc. Do I want an open web? We haven't had that for a long time; we've had Big Tech building moats and monopolies to siphon up all the value (most recently evident in the Google DOJ antitrust suit, their ad monopoly, potentially being forced to divest Chrome, their agreement for default search with Apple, and so on). Generative AI is a watershed moment where users can get some control back over how they consume and ETL the data they are interested in, and this is not great for incumbents.