Good points, you made clear this is no black/white case, it depends on how much we can trust cloudflare. It’s a US based for-profit company so the answer is “not much”.

However, if you check the link, you’ll see that they’re able to distinguish AI bot scrapping from other forms of scrapping. They also give the website owners a choice, so if it’s about principles, owners can choose to boycott, as most are already doing with robots.txt, which AI bros have no respect for.

Cloudflare does not benefit from a handful of websites getting all the traffic, and their track record is good so far. They also don’t profit from people visiting websites with a browser, they don’t show/own ads. To me, they have enough credit for me to believe they can protect open web.

We’ll see how this take ages though. I still won’t put all my eggs in a single basket.

https://www.theverge.com/24121399/cloudflare-matthew-prince-internet-free-speech-8chan-ukraine-aristotle-decoder-interview