Web Bot Auth

As much as I understand this is needed it rubs me the wrong way.

The standard looks fine as a distributed protocol until you have to register to pay a rent to Cloudflare, which they say will eventually trickle down into publishers pocket but you know what having a middleman this powerful means to the power dynamics of the market. Publishers have a really bad hand no matter what we do to save them, content as we know it will have to adapt.

Give it a couple more iterations and some MBA will come up with the brilliant idea of introducing an internet toll to humans and selling a content bundle with unlimited access to websites.

There is just too much spam and it's not clear that is a solvable problem without Cloudflare (or some other similar service). Maybe if they get big enough the incentives to spam will vanish and non Cloudflare sites can exist in peace (at-least until enough people leave Cloudflare that spam become profitable again).

Cloudflare is only the first to market with a solution. If this proposal catches on every WAF vendor under the sun will have it implemented before the next sales cycle. Enforcement of this standard will be commoditized down to nothing.