Cloudflare is a gatekeeper because they’re trying to insert themselves between the owner and the end-user. Despite all the altruistic signaling, they really just want to capitalize on AI. And they’re happy to do that even if it results in a subpar experience for the end-user. They started this with a focus on news organizations, so I’m not particularly excited about trying to block AI access and lock down the web through one private company just so we can preserve 90s era clickbait businesses.
>Cloudflare is a gatekeeper because they’re trying to insert themselves between the owner and the end-user
But they can't insert themselves without the owner directly adding them. So it's the owner that's doing the gatekeeping(regardless if it's Cloudflare or iptables rules)
I think all you AI people blaming Cloudflare are just trying to deflect from the actual problem which is more and more owners don't want AI crawlers going through their content.
If Cloudflare dissapears who are you going to blame next, the iptables developers, maybe Linus Torvalds?