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this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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They don't think they're the arbitrer of scraping dumbass, this is a service they're selling to websites who don't want AI scrapers taking adnatage of them.
They are precisely deciding who can scrape what by sitting in the middle of like 30% of internet traffic & denying access. There is no way to tell if this ‘scraping’ is for research, hobby, commercial, or “AI” purposes; conveniently if it can make Cloudflare money, they’ll let you charge a toll. If Cloudflare cared about AI issues, they wouldn’t be having unpaid users solve/train their hCAPTCHA models just for visiting a site from Tor, a VPN, or even just a non-‘Western’ IP address. The fact that folks/businesses bought into this centralization is frightening—with little open access to information or allowing folks to stay anonymous (whatever their motivation).
Also don’t dare call someone “dumbass” if you can’t be bothered to turn on spell check or understand how commas work.
Them being able to offer this service, and them proxying 30% of the internet are completely unrelated. Any other company could offer this scrape protection if they wanted, with roughly the same cost of entry.
You can hate cloudflare all you like, but only a certified dumbass would try to pretend this feature is somehow enabled by their market dominance...
A US corporation cornering the market then charging their own fees to use the service (surfing & scraping are basically the same action)? Never seen this before. Sounds uber evil—I couldn’t airbnbelieve it.