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

> An allowlist run by ONE company?

An allowlist run by one company that site owners chose to engage with. But the irony of taking an ideological stance about fairness while using AI generated comics for blog posts…

> An allowlist run by one company that site owners chose to engage with.

Exactly, no problem with that, just hinting that's not a protocol.

> But the irony of taking an ideological stance about fairness while using AI generated comics for blog posts

Wait, what?

It's a frying pan/fire choice that could create a de-facto standard we end up depending on, during a critical moment where the hot topic could have a protocol or standards based solution. Cloudflare is actively trying to make a blue ocean for themselves of a real issue affecting everyone.

>But the irony of taking an ideological stance about fairness while using AI generated comics for blog posts…

"But you participate in society!"

> Wait, what?

I was referring to the following image:

https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zRK-!,w_1250,h_703,c...

I know the image, what I do not understand is the argument between using it being incompatible with "fairness" and "openness"

GenAI image generation is not fair.

also: “Cloudelare” ;-P

Cloudflare is implementing the (still-emerging) Web Bot Auth standard. We're working on the same at Stytch for https://IsAgent.dev .

The discourse around this is a little wild and I'm glad you said this. The allowlist is a Cloudflare feature and their customers are free to use it. The core functionality involving HTTP Message Signatures is decentralized and open, so anyone can adopt it and benefit.

I can't speak for the other commenter, but I think companies like Midjourney and OpenAI are robber barons exploiting people's creative work in ways that obviously aren't fair, but that our legal system wasn't equipped to prevent.

THANK YOU. The discourse on this is wild, people seem to be ranting agianst the Web Bot Auth standard without understanding what it is because of their (honestly quite legitimate) fears about Cloudflare's gatekeeping near-monopology.

If there's a way that the Web Both Auth standard might make their near-monopoly more harmful, we can talk about it, but let's focus on that -- the Web Both Auth standard itself is solving a problem that we in fact need solving, and seems to be designed properly for the use case. From my point of view as a site operator, it will actually help me allow in bot agents I want to allow in, that currently I'm being forced to block by trying to block all bot actors because of their expense to my site, without exception. I want to be able to make exceptions!

The giant wave of ridiculous distributed bot traffic of the past 1-2 years is very very real.

> An allowlist run by one company that site owners chose to engage with. The allow/blocklist is pre-filled by CloudFlare.

The bots/crawlers/browsers are pre-categorized by CloudFlare.

Defaults matter and how CloudFlare categorizes your privacy-focuses or agentic browser would impact your experience on a good chunk of the web.