I worked at a couple of companies that tried to do internal LOB apps. Every single time, these projects have failed because the cost to maintain usually is more than just paying a subscription fee to a third party.

My household might be an anomaly but my kids know and prefer YouTubers more to Disney characters.

I had a similar experience with GCP / Google Workspace. It's just bad experience.

Seems related to another article [1] I've seen recently where a lot of e-commerce traffic is also mostly bots.

[1] https://joindatacops.com/resources/how-73-of-your-e-commerce...

Reminds me of the good ol' days of SA:MP.

let's resurrect these days with open.mp!

Same but just entertainment device. I still don't understand where the iPad Pro makes sense.

It's great for image retouching and illustration, especially on the go.

It's also very handy for running VSTs (well, AUs really) and jamming with keyboards or guitars (with something like iRig)

Same! I was trying to buy but wasn't able to.

So Cloudflare is establishing themselves as the toll station for the internet.

What proportion of websites do they need to gatekeep before the label applies?

Cloudflare is trying to establish itself as the toll station for AI. And anyone who doesn't play by their rules gets excommunicated.

the end game will be ai training bots will have to be:

1) like 1 cent or fraction of cent to get access to page

2) scrawlers will just cache this data on their server or just train on it so will pay just once

3) small content creators will get just make like few dollars our of it

4) CF will get some 10-30% cut from their content semaphore.

5) in the end you small content creator trading their whole content for few dollars but because CF has mass of scale they will make multi millions or more.

Unless you have an idea to stop scraping, the status quo is all downside. Everything gets grabbed but also crawlers overwhelm servers.

So… invest in Cloudflare

No we don't. We're accepting it as if it's our only option.

Yes most web properties have voluntarily adopted Cf as their only protection option. Do you or I have the power to get hundreds of millions if not billions of these properties off of Cf? No, so yes they're a reality of the Web at this point, sadly. They can be no more avoided than say the tier 1 ISPs.

What’s the other option?

Consumers can pay for Ladybird themselves.

A culture that encourages rewarding creators for their work.

Sure, as long as consumers are not forced to update which will justify a subscription model.