What comes after search? Cloudflare’s CEO says that’s an ‘existential’ question for the internet

Google has made it much easier to find the answers we seek without navigating to various websites, but that has made it much harder to do business for media companies and other creators. And this new era of artificial intelligence-powered search will reshape the future of the internet, according to Matthew Prince, cofounder and CEO of Cloudflare.

Cloudflare has a unique vantage point because it counts content creators and artificial intelligence companies among the more than 20% of the internet that sits behind its network. Driven by a mission to build a better internet, the San Francisco-based company is invested in finding a solution that works for all players involved.

“The search-driven business model of the internet isn’t going to be the business model of the internet going forward,” Prince said Sunday during a discussion at the Fast Company Grill at SXSW. “And to the extent that we can help figure that business model out, I think it is existential for us as a business, but it’s actually existential for the internet itself to figure out a new business model.”

After ChatGPT was released to the public in late 2022, Prince recalled how publishers and content creators began to increasingly identify AI companies as their biggest villain. And because the current dynamic of AI systems crawling these websites for information doesn’t provide any incentive for original content creators to churn out new content, that’s a problem for everyone—including Cloudflare.

“If people aren’t creating original content, that’s the gasoline that fuels these engines, so you need to have that original content,” Prince said.

Prince proposed a three-step possible solution. First, it’s important to create scarcity so creators don’t give away content for free; then if creators have the tools to identify when AI systems are crawling their websites, they’ll have control over which of those systems can access this information; and finally, the process should be monetized with a rate card in which content creators dictate how much it costs to crawl their pages.

Evolution of a ‘better internet’

That Cloudflare is now thinking about the information ecosystem online is indicative of how much the internet has evolved since the company’s founding in 2009. Even the name was a nod to the major internet issues of that time: creating a firewall in the cloud. 

Whereas an encrypted internet was once the table stakes, Prince said, the standard has now become post-quantum resistant encryption. And looking ahead, Cloudflare’s mission to help build a better internet could mean protecting customers against Chinese hackers or making sure they’re fairly compensated for the content they create, he added.

And he has an even more ambitious goal to make sure that information online continues to be available to all who need it.

“My utopian vision of the future is that we get to a place where humans get content for free and bots have to pay a lot for it,” Prince said. “I can afford to sign up for a bunch of paywalls, but I really do worry about the kid in Rwanda who’s brilliant, but today has much less access even though there’s just as much information out there.”

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