Re: Building an open Agentic Internet: readable, discoverable, callable, and payable

I follow Cloudflare's blog because it's useful to keep an eye on what the cadre of nazi apologists that man-in-the-middle something north of 10% of the web traffic on the Internet are up to and what fresh hell (like their constant bot detection interstitial nags and CAPTCHAs) they are about to inflict on us. One of their latest marketing skreeds is a bit of a doozy.

Building an open Agentic Internet: readable, discoverable, callable, and payable

It starts out with this banger:

Our data shows that a lot of traffic from well-behaved bots is re-fetching pages that have not changed. Billions of requests. An enormous amount of machine effort, attached to no outcome at all. That's the signature of a web built for humans being visited by something else.

Billions of requests for things that have not changed is not what I would present to my readers as "well-behaved". I suspect the reality here is that well-behaved means "run by our customers or companies we wish to attach ourselves to like a lamprey."

They continue...

An agent doesn't render your CSS, see your hero image, or click your ads. But it has a paying human on the other end. Every request now costs someone money and carries a purpose. Block it and you block your customer. Treat it like a scraper and you lose them.

Every agent runs because someone — a person or a business — is paying for what it does. Most people don't spend tokens for the sake of it. This version of the Internet, one with an outcome and a bill on the other end of every request, is going to look nothing like the one we have now.

I think here we start to see where they're going. To continue to harvest value from their position as middle-box to a dangerously large portion of the Internet they have to paint the picture that the storm of AI bot bullshit is good, necessary, and inevitable which is, at best a debatable set of positions. It also shows the arrogance and hubris amongst the AI companies that they are dictators of the future shape of the web.

The web was built by the users. Standard makers, software engineers, and plain old schmucks who put up websites like me defined what the web was. Companies like this wave of tech parasites came in and have been trying to re-make the web into an extractive sales funnel ever since.

The fantasy here seems to be you feed your credentials and into your OpenClaw agent, it wanders around the Internet shitting on websites, leaving UwU I'm just a helpful little guy promises and micro-transactions that every thirsty rent-seeker can just hoover up. A programmatic link directly into your pocket.

Cloudflare believes in the open Internet, and we're in a position to help build the future where it thrives.

They then waffle on with a bunch of marketing and vaporware for a while, mostly envisioning fairly pointless use-cases like pay-per-view recipe and news sites as if their monetization woes are somehow going to be solved by slopifying everything, then hanging a checkbook on the side via some inscrutable set of "standards".

Cloudflare has spent years detecting bots, allowing domain owners to take control of whether bots can access them. What's been missing is the other half: how agents interact with those sites once they're let in. That's what this suite of agentic tools is for: making the web readable, discoverable, callable, payable. These four primitives are all built on open standards, so no single company owns the rails.

The reality is that 2 companies make the LLMs, 1 company makes the browser, 1 company does online payments, and Cloudflare sits in the middle of the websites so really the open-ness of the standards are completely irrelevant. This is programmatic rent-seeking, plain and simple. It's fairly close to an existential crisis already that Cloudflare interposes itself on as much of the Internet as it does. It wields so much power over standards bodies (remind me why we needed HTTP/3 over QUIC again), and for many it has become the go-to solution for the absolute flood of terribly-behaving bots. Cloudflare represents as much of a threat to the ongoing enclosure of the Internet as the hyper-scalers and Meta do. This post just goes to show how they are going to try to position agentic AI as a hook to try to tie micro-transactions to everything. If they're successful SEO grift is going to morph instantly into agentic grift where malicious websites trap agents in money-harvesting honeypots. Since you can't tell if your agent is hallucinating or just getting bad data, it's going to be the perfect scam.

Unless of course this AI thing is all hype being spewed by a tech industry that has run out of hypergrowth ideas that is...