The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch

Ok, I'll bite. Why is turning the Internet into a walled garden necessary now?

Multi-Tbps DDoS attacks, pervasive scanning of sites for exploits, comically expensive egress bandwidth on services like AWS, and ISPs disallowing hosting services on residential accounts.

Start forcing tighter security on the devices causing the Multi-Tbps DDoS attacks would be a better option, no? Cheap unsecured IoT devices are a problem.

It's not just computers anymore. Web enabled CCTV, doorbell cameras are all culprits.

Commercial, criminal, and state interests have far more resources than you do, and their interests are in direct conflict with yours.

That would be fine, you could walk away and go home, but if you're going to drive on their digital highways, you're going to need "insurance" just protect you from everyone else.

Ongoing multi-nation WWIII-scale hacking and infiltration campaigns of infrastructure, AI bot crawling, search company and startup crawling, security researchers crawling, and maybe somebody doesn't like your blog and decides to rent a botnet for a week or so.

Bet your ISP shuts you off before then to protect themselves. (Happens all the time via BGP blackholing, DDoS scrubbing services, BGP FlowSpec, etc).

And home routers, printers, and end user devices themselves. Residential ISP networks can be infiltrated and remote CVE'd through browser calls at this point from a remote website. It's not even hard.

How would you secure someone else's devices?