>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.