Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
The internet for a long time was growing like crazy.
Chapter 2: When will AI bot traffic surpass human traffic?
And then it kind of stalled out for the last little bit. And the number of new websites that were being created, number of new domains, kind of plateaued from about 2012, 2011, 2012, until actually quite recently. What's changed is,
Chapter 3: What role does Cloudflare play in internet security?
I think that because a lot of these tools have allowed more people to be creators, to be coders, to be developers, actually for the first time in really the last 15 years, the number of websites that are being created, the number of new things that are happening is actually growing again and growing at rates that look like what the early 2000s growth rates of the internet looked like.
So I actually think that's kind of optimistic that there's more things that are being created that are out there and are coming online.
Bankless Nation, very excited to introduce you to Matthew Prince. He's the co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. That's a $70 billion company that sits between the internet and roughly 20% of the world's websites run on top of Cloudflare. I think he's one of the most thoughtful voices on the question of how is the business model of the internet changing?
He's also recently joined X402, got some stablecoin stuff to talk about. Matthew, there's so much to discuss today. Welcome to Bankless.
Chapter 4: What is the internet’s business model problem?
Thank you for having me. So we've seen estimates that at a certain year, AI bot traffic is going to exceed all human traffic on the internet. I don't know if that's 2027, 2028, 2029, or maybe even this year. When do you think that happens? And is the internet ready for it?
Yeah, you know, I think that based on what we've seen, we were saying it was 2027. We're now saying it's the first half of 2027 that that will cross. It's just been extraordinary to watch the growth of agentic traffic, bot traffic over the last little bit. And for a long time, bots were bad.
But you increasingly are seeing these agents, which are actually helping humans, trying to do things which are really useful, just driving an enormous amount of traffic. And I think any of us who have used any of these AI tools can see how that happens.
Chapter 5: How are AI agents impacting the advertising industry?
If I'm personally going to go think about buying a new digital camera, I might go to a site or two, a few pages that are out there, and then I'll make a decision. Someone who's maybe more thorough than I might go to five sites and compare reviews. The agents, you can just watch it as you ask a chat GPT or a grok or a clod to do work on your behalf.
Chapter 6: Why are faster answers potentially harmful to content creators?
They're taking oftentimes a thousand times more time in-depth research, and that means there's just a lot more traffic that is hitting the internet. In terms of whether the internet's ready, I think that's a little bit of an open question. I think one of the challenges, you know, from a technical perspective, I think we can manage that and we can scale through it.
We've seen explosive growth in internet traffic before. I hearken back to like April of 2020 when COVID hit and all of a sudden overnight, internet traffic doubled over the course of two weeks. And it was extraordinary how much the system still held together. And while it created challenges, it was able to scale and we were able to keep the internet functioning and help us get through that time.
I think this is the same sort of moment where you're going to see a lot more traffic. So I think technically we'll be okay. I think the big question, though, is what's the business model going to be and who's going to pay for it? Because there's a lot of servers, there's a lot of infrastructure, there's a lot of stuff which is behind all of that.
And if the business model of the internet for the last 30 years has been ads and subscriptions, problem is agents don't click on ads. And buying one subscription and then having agents be able to basically pick all of the content back up from that That's not going to help make sure that the people who are creating that content get compensated for it.
The people who are providing the infrastructure to power that content get actually compensated for the work that they're doing. And so we have to figure out some new business model. And that's a lot of what I'm spending my time thinking about these days.
Well, I can't wait to discuss that with you. I think that's going to be the bulk of the episode. Before we get there into the new business model that might be required, why ads are breaking down, why subscriptions are breaking down, talk about Cloudflare for just a second, because I think...
Our audience may not know exactly what Cloudflare does, even though they're probably a daily active user of Cloudflare, because if Cloudflare turned off tomorrow, big chunks of the web that would just go completely dark. And you guys have been part of the story of how the Internet has scaled over the last decade or so.
One way I think of Cloudflare is sort of like, you know, that ice wall from Game of Thrones, where it's just like this giant ice wall that kept the White Walkers out and all of the bad bots and, you know, Russia and North Korea and just malicious things. You guys play a role in that. I know that's not all you do, though. Talk about...
How would you explain Cloudflare to, I guess, you know, a normal tech savvy audience member?
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