Gonna zag here. If you take a step back, cloudflare has been paving the path for pay for crawl. I think it's a noble and ambitious goal.
While I can understand why you would be alarmed, I can point to almost two decades of lamenting on this forum about how we need better ways of rewarding content creators than ads. Well, this is it.
Moreover, these products weren't built in a vacuum. Most threads about Anthropic and OpenAI have complaints about how these companies were built on stolen content. There's a reality we have to face here and we can't have it both ways.
Is it a better way though? The problem with ads has always been their abusive nature. From unrestrained pop ups and clickjacking in the 90s to today's pervasive surveillance and profiling.
Cloudflare turnstile is a pop up. This product is pervasive surveillance. It having a cf logo doesn't change that or ameliorate the many many abuses that two decades have shown are part and parcel.
What's incredible is that you have businesses paying CloudFlare to stop their content being ingested by AIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Self-operated scrapers).
And at the same time, they're paying SEO experts to make that same content easier to be ingested by systems (Google and other Search Engines) which use it for their own AI offerings.
Are you going to be able to make your online content available to Google Search but unavailable for Google Gemini?
While I can understand why you would be alarmed, I can point to almost two decades of lamenting on this forum about how we need better ways of rewarding content creators than ads. Well, this is it.
Moreover, these products weren't built in a vacuum. Most threads about Anthropic and OpenAI have complaints about how these companies were built on stolen content. There's a reality we have to face here and we can't have it both ways.