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Cloudflare CEO warns AI and zero-click internet are killing the web's business model
(www.techspot.com)
Maybe it’s a good thing if the Internet eats itself.
this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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If only we can somehow figure out how to bring back something like the web of the ’90s
Federation, mostly. Places like Lemmy and Mastodon aren’t obsessed with optimizing ad spend, so there’s a lot less incentive to enshittify.
I have high hopes
YouTubers are doing webrings again, I shit you not. I love it.
Ok that’s cool
It mostly still exists, you just arent interacting with it.
Unfortunately no one else is interacting with it either. I miss the old style forums, and most of the ones I used to frequent are still online. But they all haven't had any real activity in years, so they aren't really usable anymore unfortunately.
I call it the side web.
It feels like sneaking along on the shoulder of the information super highway.
The zero click searches just haven't been monetized yet. Don't worry they are working on it
Totino’s Pizza Rolls remind you AI makes mistakes, always double check important information. [AD]
Reminder: the Internet has its roots from ARPANET which is designed to survive an atomic blast and openly available to learn. A dead web business model won't kill the technology that allows humans to instantly communicate. If anything a new internet may come of this once the money dries up.
Yep there is nothing stopping new web sites coming online. It's just hard to find them. Guess what was also hard in the early Internet days? Finding them. Web rings may make a big comeback.
Web rings may make a big comeback.
I've got great news for you
This is some good stuff. Thank you!
I have a few books that came free with PC mags back in the day, full of links to mad crazy websites and interesting/useful stuff. So few pixels back then!!
Ah yes when the money that we give monthly to connect dries up. Yes that money will certainly dry up sometime
You're mixing ISP fees with Ad/monetized content revenue (the "web business model"). One is a shortcut to not having build your own infrastructure and the other is for people we don't really need for the internet to function.
Let me know when it hits you what we actually need for the Internet to function
Let me know when you understand how the internet works.
It is a series of tubes. At no point does the webshop business model make the internet itself work. Happy to be of assistance
Did I not make that statement about how we don't need the webshop business model? You just need a tube to connect to the series of tubes. You can pay someone for the tube or make your own damn tube.
Yes. So still, the isp that buy networks so they get built, then you can rent cable access from them. It's like you are confusing my position with yours?
I don't know where the confusion is. Maybe a typo? I don't know.
"A new internet may come when the money for this one dries up" I refute it because it is just cabling and it's not going anywhere
You know there's an Internet 2 right? That's what I'm talking about when I stated "A new internet" . A real Internet 3 and not "Web 3.0". Internet 2 is a separate series of tubes, cables, wires, whatever you want to call it dedicated to just research. You know what's not on Internet 2? Ads or web business models. So I have no idea what you are refuting. Nobody said we needed Web Business to make the cables work. Nobody said the money drying up would make the internet cease to function.
Well the internet had a good run up to about 2008
It was around that time when we started making people visit the same 5-10 sites. Facebook virus indeed.
Oh no! Not the business model!
Imagine we had to go back to creative, self-hosted websites, wouldn't that be terrible
back to the good old days when "self-hosting" wasnt even a term because of course you would be hosting it yourself!
Yes, please. Let's do that.
Long live the Fediverse?
Google is in an interesting predicament. Their ad service brings in so much revenue, but it's based on search sending traffic to places where those ads are consumed.
Boost search through Overviews and you're limiting the effectiveness and reach of your ad service. And to top it off, your search needs content to ingest and remain relevant. But if the ad revenue drops off to websites, they go out of business, so search has less stuff to ingest.
It's like a reverse flywheel, where each part is working to harm the other part. People have been pointing this out for the last couple of years, but Google search just keeps adding more to Overviews and choking off the flow.
And before you say "good, I hate ads," most of the internet today and its services are paid by ad revenue changing hands. That includes ISPs that host the Fediverse, networking and storage gear makers, pretty much everything to do with open source, and so many jobs that exist to keep the whole thing humming so we can enjoy cat memes.
If Google (or someone like Cloudflare) doesn't figure out a way to keep the money flowing, we may be watching a sea shift in how the internet has worked in the last 30 years.
I think Google can never really hope to disrupt itself. The entire company is oriented towards selling those ads. So any other internal division that tries to eliminate the ads division is going to have a very uphill battle.
IMO the industry is ripening for disruption and someone will come along with a new idea for how to incentivize content generation and it will very likely continue to involve some heavy commercial marketing.
yea they need those ads, youtube ads bring in around 37bn for the platform in ad revenue.
Google and/or Cloudflare seem to be in a Catch-22 if they don't make good decisions.
duckduckgo added the "instant answers" sidebar for the first time back in 2014 and google did the same not too long after, so its definitely not a new issue