Maybe the title means something more like "The web should not have gatekeepers (Cloudflare)". They do seem to say as much toward the end:
>We need protocols, not gatekeepers.
But until we have working protocols, many webmasters literally do need a gatekeeper if they want to realistically keep their site safe and online.
I wish this weren't the case, but I believe the "protocol" era of the web was basically ended when proprietary web 2.0 platforms emerged that explicitly locked users in with non-open protocols. Facebook doesn't want you to use Messenger in an open client next to AIM, MSN, and IRC. And the bad guys won.
But like I said, I hope I'm wrong.
>We need protocols, not gatekeepers
The funny thing is that this blog post is complaining about a proposed protocol from Cloudflare (one which will identify bots so that good bots can be permitted). The signup form is just a method to ask Cloudflare (or any other website owner/CDN) to be categorized as a good bot.
It's not a great protocol if you're in the business of scraping websites or selling people bots to access websites for them, but it's a great protocol for people who just want their website to work without being overwhelmed by the bad side of the internet.
The whitelist approach Cloudflare takes isn't good for the internet, but for website owners who are already behind Cloudflare, it's better than the alternative. Someone will need to come up with a better protocol that also serves the website owners' needs if they want Cloudflare to fail here. The AI industry simply doesn't want to cooperate, so their hand must be forced, and only companies like Cloudflare are powerful enough to accomplish that.
Conventional crawlers already have a way to identify themselves, via a json file containing a list of IP addresses. Cloudflare is fully aware of this defacto standard.