Reflections on Cloudflare’s Annual Founders’ Letter

Some personal considerations

I just read Cloudflare’s 2025 Annual Founders’ Letter and found it quite insightful. Much of today’s lobbying, often driven by governments and large media companies, seems to push toward a strictly regulated internet, a model profoundly disrespectful of the values the net was originally built upon. These lobbying actions can be summed up in just one word: censorship, with privacy compression not far behind.

Cloudflare’s approach, on the other hand, feels very different: a liberal, agnostic stance that doesn’t deny the need for content monetization. As they put it: “what fundamentally needed to change was not more content moderation at the infrastructure level but instead a healthier incentive system for content creation.”

AI has dramatically changed the rules. Instead of driving users to websites where creators might at least earn some reward in terms of advertising revenue or personal recognition, AI agents now consume the content for us, leaving (at best) only faint traces of attribution.

Sites that built their reputation on answers (like Stack Exchange) have been torn apart by AI. The simplest LLM can now surface correct answers without the hassle of scrolling through hundreds of posts.

Social media platforms, on the other hand, seem more resistant: users still feel the urge to open the original article so they can comment, debate, or rant. But even this model has its dark side: the rise of content farms that thrive on clickbait or ragebait.

Cloudflare’s vision is to create a new business model that incentivizes genuine content creation: rewarding authors when their work is used to train or answer through AI systems. It’s almost like the old “bounty” model of Stack Exchange. But with real money at stake.

If this model works, it could realign the incentives of the internet, giving creators a fair share in the AI-driven future. The real challenge is whether the industry will value people (users and creators) who make the web worth having over the seemingly unlimited funds that governments and disinformation factories are ready to pour into the system.