Matthew Prince

Either you completely exclude all your content from search

Or we get to use it for AI, especially the AI overviews that they have.

And that gives them effectively an unfair advantage over every other AI company that's out there.

If we are able to get them to voluntarily give that away and split those two things apart, say search is different than AI.

then I think that that will actually unlock every other AI company being willing to pay for content.

Because now we can actually block Google from using it for AI versus otherwise.

So that's a place that there might be legislative action.

Again, I'm hopeful that Google will do the right thing and support the ecosystem before it comes to that.

We've also done things at Cloudflare, because again, one of the things you can do is you don't need legislation.

You can just have contract.

So we added a license.

that basically says that site owners have the right to say how their content is going to be used by robots and that they can opt into search without opting into AI.

And again, that's a contract, which if it's ignored, you know, we can go to court and we can see if it will be will be enforced.

And I think that's right.

And again, the best AI rulings that we've had have said, yeah, actually, AI use is a lot like reading a book.

With technology, the answer is always yes, it's sort of like that.

The problem becomes it's like reading a book, but at massive scale.

It's not just about reading one book, it's about reading all the books all at once, right?

So it's hard for us to conceive of these things that actually have almost human-like characteristics and qualities, but have machine-like scale and velocity.

And that's I think those are the places where actually it's it becomes very difficult to figure out how to regulate and to legislate.