Cloudflare’s recent market announcement to monetize information gatekeeping is harmful to all of the ecosystem, even those who, at the moment, think this may benefit them. This threatens a simple but powerful principle that I consistently defend: public data should remain public.
The move to charge AI companies for access to public web data isn’t about protecting creators, it’s about control. It sets a dangerous precedent that turns the open internet into a gated network where access to public information is sold to the highest bidder.
It attempts to rewrite the rules of the web, which enabled decades of innovation, competition, and free access to knowledge. Undermining it threatens everything built on top of it.
The internet is evolving rapidly. As AI and chatbots become the primary interface for how people interact with online content, we’re entering a new era, one where the visibility of your content in this AI-driven ecosystem will determine your relevance. If access to public data is controlled by a few infrastructure providers, they decide who gets seen and who disappears. That’s not innovation, that’s gatekeeping.
This is a wake-up call for businesses: if you want your content to be seen on the new internet, you must decide now whether it should remain publicly accessible. If you don’t want your data to be collected, there’s a simple solution, put it behind a login. Once it’s gated, it’s no longer public.
U.S. courts have consistently upheld the legality of accessing and collecting publicly available information online, provided it is done ethically and without deception. The right to access public data is not just a technical or commercial issue, it’s a legal one, and it’s protected. This clarity benefits everyone: businesses, developers, researchers, and publishers by establishing a fair and consistent framework for what can and cannot be accessed.
We’ve come face to face with this same challenge many times before; internet control under the mask of privacy and security. Control comes at a cost that you will end up paying for.
Attempts to block ethical access to public data doesn’t stop data collection, it empowers bad actors and weakens transparency. It also risks biasing AI systems toward the content of those who can afford to pay for visibility, further concentrating power in the hands of a few. And it cuts publishers off from ethical data monetization models and risks making their content invisible
The reality is public data is still being collected, and nothing has or will change.
I don’t believe in forcing market dynamics. We believe in shaping them through value creation. The future of the internet should be open, fair, and accessible, not controlled by a handful of gatekeepers. We need to work together to protect all stakeholders as the internet and markets shift, recognizing that a solution for creators and monetization cannot fit all.
Public data is still being collected. AI still depends on it. Creators still need their content discoverable. And those of us who believe in an open internet, the principle on which it was founded, will continue to vehemently defend access to public web data, because the future of the internet depends on it.
