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progbitsyesterday at 4:24 PM4 repliesview on HN

CF is trying to double dip: they are charging users for their CDN, and now they try to also charge for the privilege of accessing their user's content.

While I love to see openai get scammed I don't think it will stop there. How cheap and useful do you think Kagi or other search engines can stay with this racket? How will Internet Archive operate?


Replies

adriandyesterday at 5:44 PM

How is this a racket? This is a service website owners want, and it (that is, Cloudflare’s resurrection of the 402 Payment Required response) seems to be one of the few schemes that can work at scale. The current situation, where AI companies benefit from content created under the premise of advertising revenue, is not just unethical, it’s uneconomical to the point of driving content creators out of business.

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lxgryesterday at 4:27 PM

> How will Internet Archive operate?

Presumably increasingly less and less effectively, at least if they continue honoring robots.txt and don't implement scraping protection bypass mechanisms.

https://www.theverge.com/news/757538/reddit-internet-archive...

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rsyncyesterday at 6:32 PM

"CF is trying to double dip: they are charging users for their CDN, and now they try to also charge for the privilege of accessing their user's content."

Don't forget that cloudflare provides service to the very botnets and flooders/booters they purport to protect against.

Would that be triple-dipping ? Or do we have a special term for this specific behavior ?

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toomuchtodoyesterday at 6:26 PM

The Internet Archive will potentially receive an exemption if they embargo content crawled and dark it (stored but not publicly available) until an agreed upon future date.