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Internet backend provider Cloudflare has introduced a cryptocurrency to enable publishers to be paid for AI bots trawling their content.
The currency, Net Dollar, is a stablecoin pegged to the US dollar – meaning that its value does not float independently, but instead maintains a 1:1 relationship with the USD.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince described how Net Dollar would allow microtransactions and therefore incentivise original content.
“For decades, the business model of the Internet ran on ad platforms and bank transfers. The Internet’s next business model will be powered by pay-per-use, fractional payments, and microtransactions,” he said in a written statement.
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Matthew Prince at the Cannes interview where he strongly criticised AI companies
“By using our global network, we are going to help modernize the financial rails needed to move money at the speed of the Internet.”
Cloudflare’s network is significant. It claims that around 20% of the world’s websites and a significant proportion of all internet traffic passes through its hands.
Prince began publicly speaking about how Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini break the basic “quid pro quo” of the web earlier this year.
On Cloudflare’s analysis, AI chatbots deliver just a fraction of the traffic to publishers compared to traditional search engines.
LLMs return one referral for hundreds or even thousands of page scrapes (in the case of Anthropic’s Claude, Cloudflare claimed it scraped 79,000 times on average for every single referral it gave out).
AI companies have rejected Cloudflare’s numbers and analysis.
Cloudflare further stepped up its campaign by introducing a system where its customers could block AI bots from scraping their sites – and declared the setting would be the default for new customers.
“AI crawlers have been scraping content without limits,” Prince said back in July. “Our goal is to put the power back in the hands of creators, while still helping AI companies innovate. This is about safeguarding the future of a free and vibrant Internet with a new model that works for everyone.”
Not everyone has been buying what Cloudflare is selling, with some commentators pointing out that if Cloudflare succeeds, it would be in a very powerful position.
Writing in Mumbrella, Louder CTO Ian Kenney said Cloudflare’s system of blocking and charging looked good in the short term, it could mean “mean every API call, AI crawler, and page view comes with a tollbooth.”
“Every time a single entity begins to insert itself as the arbiter of access, we need to ask, when does protection become control? When does convenience become rent-seeking?”
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