Cloudflare has often been described as some version of “the most important internet company you’ve never heard of.” But for the better part of 2025, cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince has been trying to change that.
The company’s core business is to improve the performance and enhance the security of websites and online applications, protecting against malicious actors and routing web traffic through its data centers to optimize performance. “Six billion people pass through our network every single month,” Prince says. If Cloudflare is doing its job well, no one notices.
But in July, Prince declared “Content Independence Day,” a broadside against the AI companies that, in his view, were unfairly scraping content to the detriment of the media industry. Cloudflare enabled clients that signed up for its “pay per crawl” service to block AI crawlers from accessing their content unless the companies—Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc.—paid for the privilege. This was catnip to the media, Fast Company included, which immediately started paying a lot more attention to Cloudflare. “I think this is the most interesting question over the next five years,” Prince says. “What is the future business model of the internet going to be?”
Prince has a personal interest in this question. He was the editor of his school newspaper at Trinity College (the Connecticut one, not Dublin) and, in 2023, he and his wife purchased the Park Record, his hometown newspaper in Park City, Utah. “I appreciate the hard work of our journalistic team, who’s showing up at city council meetings, covering local politics. There has to be a business model to support that work,” he says. “That work is critically important if we’re going to have a functioning society.”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Before Cloudflare, you cofounded Unspam Technologies, an email spam-checker service, and the open-source Project Honey Pot, which tracks and identifies spammers and malicious bots. There’s a common thread to your companies. They’re all about preventing something bad from happening, from spam to cyberattacks to unauthorized data scraping. What would a psychiatrist say about this?
I guess I have a superhero fetish or something.
You’re a protector.
A protector, yeah. I went to law school, and so a lot of the ideas start with: Where is there a failure in society? And if we solve that problem in some way, we’ll be able to turn that into a business. And that’s worked, really. It didn’t work as well with the first spam company [Unspam], but at Cloudflare, it’s really driven everything that we’ve done.
What was your original mission for Cloudflare and how has it changed?
Cloudflare started about 15 years ago, when [cofounder and COO] Michelle [Zatlyn] and I were business students. When people would ask us what our mission was, we’d say, “Our mission is to take advantage of this interesting market opportunity, make some money, and impress our parents.” Which is, I think, if anyone’s being honest, kind of why almost everything starts.
We knew that in order to build out the network to service large customers, we needed data and we needed ways to build the models to figure out who the good guys were, who the bad guys were, and [how] to stop them.
We had the bright idea that we would offer a free version of the service. We thought startups and individual developers would be the ones who would sign up. That’s not what happened at first. What happened was that every civil society organization, every nonprofit, every humanitarian organization signed up because they had small budgets but big security problems. So one day we realized that everyone who was doing some sort of good around the internet was relying on us. I remember going to lunch with a bunch of our engineers, and one of them said, “This is the first job where I feel like I’m actually helping build a better internet.” That resonated, and that phrase kept coming up. Finally someone said, “That’s Cloudflare’s mission: to help build a better internet.” And that’s what stuck.
Cloudflare experienced a significant outage in mid-November after a routine infrastructure update. You corrected that problem within a few hours, but how do you mitigate these risks moving forward? Does the rise of AI affect the risk of these kinds of incidents?
Any outage is unacceptable given Cloudflare’s role in supporting a large portion of the Internet, and we take full responsibility. We’re implementing additional safeguards to help prevent similar incidents in the future. Past outages have always led us to build new, more resilient systems. We’ll also remain transparent, as we’ve always been in these situations; we published a postmortem within about 12 hours to share what happened and what we’re learning.
As the internet evolves, including the rise of AI, we continually assess new risks to ensure our systems remain resilient. Outages and bugs can happen—that’s the nature of software—but our customers’ trust is our top priority.
Over the years, you’ve come under pressure to deny service to sites that are associated with hate speech and harassment, raising questions about Cloudflare’s role in content moderation. As you look ahead to the midterms and the 250th anniversary of America next year and then the national election in 2028, what concerns you most when it comes to misinformation and disinformation in the AI age?
I think it’s funny that I’m sort of known as the content moderation guy. We’re 15 years old, and we’ve had basically three incidents [the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer and extremist forums 8chan and Kiwi Farms].
Essentially, 6 billion people pass through our network every single month. That’s the entire online population. That’s the scale that we have, and we have a responsibility to those people. So the question is, When you have that responsibility, what do you do?
People have written about this for a long time. I actually went and dusted off a bunch of my philosophy books from college. Aristotle writes a lot about how governments build trust. We’re not a government, but we operate at a scale that would be inconceivable to Aristotle, and at some level have the same challenges around that. Fundamentally, Aristotle argued that there are three things you need for trust: transparency, consistency, and accountability. Transparency: You need to know what the rules are. Consistency: The same rules should be applied the same way all the time. And then accountability: The people who apply the rules should be responsible to the rules themselves.
In answer to your question, there’ve been a couple of big AI companies that have invited me to be on their boards. I’ve always said no, but I engage with them; 80% of the big AI companies are Cloudflare customers, so we have a relationship with them. I think they’re doing the right thing, and they’re going a million miles an hour. And, I mean, it’s so exciting. But we have to stop and think about: How do you build trust?
I think I’m the largest nonacademic buyer of Aristotle’s Politics on Amazon. I’ve sent signed copies to every AI executive I’ve met, saying, “I know you don’t have a lot of time, but take the time to read this.”
Let’s talk about how AI is eroding the traditional information ecosystem and what Cloudflare is trying to do about it.
Twenty-seven years ago, a fateful thing happened: Google launched and did two things. One, it built a better search engine. Even more importantly, it built the first business model and monetization model for the internet. It helps generate traffic, and then it provides you the tools to make that traffic profitable. That has funded the growth of the vast majority of the internet. We’ve gone through some platform shifts along the way. We went to social, but social was still driven by traffic.
What’s going on right now—that I think people don’t completely understand—is we’re going through another platform shift. It’s a bigger platform shift than we’ve ever seen before, which is that the way you’re going to consume information is through AI.
With a search engine, you did a search, it returned 10 blue links, and then the search wasn’t over. Google was a treasure map, which generated traffic to Fast Company or whoever; behind that treasure map, you could monetize it. But we know that’s not the end state because sci-fi tells us it’s not, and sci-fi often predicts the future pretty well. If you think about any movie that has a helpful robot in it, if you say, “I would like a recipe for chocolate chip cookies,” the robot doesn’t come back and say, “Here are 10 links, go follow ’em and maybe you’ll find a nice recipe.” It says, “Here’s the recipe.”
And that’s exactly what ChatGPT, Anthropic, and increasingly Google with AI Overviews are doing. And make no mistake: For 95% of users, 95% of the time, that’s a better user interface. That user interface is going to win and is going to be the new platform by which we consume information.
Which is quite a problem for any entity—not just the media—that wants to be found on the internet.
Right. Instead of going and generating traffic, following a treasure map, and getting to Fast Company, now you’re reading a derivative that’s been summarized and maybe combined with other sources, taking the Fast Company information and putting it in this new ChatGPT interface. And that’s a problem because the entire internet has been built on traffic, and that traffic is going away. So no matter what, as the interface of the internet changes, the business model of the internet is going to change.
You have a solution for this: the pay-per-crawl model. This business proposition theoretically enables those content providers to continue to provide that content, and be compensated for it, in a way that won’t compromise this new and—I agree—better user experience. How would this work?
I’m optimistic because both sides need each other. There are really three things you need to be an AI company, two of which are very expensive and one of which has largely been free. The two things that are expensive are going to get cheaper and cheaper, and the thing that has been free is going to be what differentiates AI companies, which they’re going to be willing to pay more for.
So, what are the three things? The first is chips, GPUs, but it’s silicon, right? There’s never been a time in history where a silicon shortage doesn’t turn into a silicon glut. There’s a bunch of sand in the world. GPUs will increasingly become commodities, the same way that CPUs and all other silicon have.
The second is talent. Five years ago, if you were getting a PhD in AI, you were kind of a laughingstock. It was thought of as this dead industry that was hot in the ’70s and ’80s, and then it became the place where the sort of weird computer science professor went and promised that tomorrow AI was coming. Well, it turns out they were right. They just had the time frame wrong. But now it’s gone from this backwater to every university spinning up a department. I don’t think there will be a glut of AI researchers, but I think the days of billion-dollar salaries at Meta—that won’t last forever because the education markets are efficient.
The last bit is content. In almost all these cases, unique content ends up being the thing that differentiates media over time. YouTube, for example, started out as a technology play. It could deliver streaming video cheaper, faster than everybody else, and that’s why it won. As the rest of the industry caught up with the technology, YouTube had to differentiate. First it was discoverability with search, now it’s with unique content that you can only get on YouTube.
I think the AI companies are going to be very, very similar, which means they’re going to need that information that only you [media companies] have. So the key—if you’re a media company today—is to stop the free buffet: Only you have the review of the hot restaurant in Tuscaloosa, which is unique content that’s going to be incredibly precious and incredibly essential. So step one is to say: “We’re not going to give every AI company our content for free. We’re going to say, ‘You’re blocked.’” That’s what we at Cloudflare have been helping with.
And then how the market develops after that, we have some ideas, but I’m not quite sure. What I’m confident in—and what the data so far bears out—is that the more unique, the more quirky, the more local your content is, the more valuable it is to AI companies, and the more likely it is that there’s going to be a healthy and sustainable marketplace that exists for you to be able to sell that content.
I think that this can be pie-expanding and that we might be on the doorstep of a golden age of media.
I love the optimism, and I want to believe it, for obvious reasons. To put a fine point on the mechanics of it, the publisher signs up; Cloudflare blocks the AI crawlers from accessing their content; the publisher sets the price for the AI company to access that content and get paid; and you guys get a cut. That’s pretty much how that works?
We have a bunch of different theories of how this could work [over time]. It could be micropayments. That’s what you’ve described, where the publisher sets a price, and then whenever an agent or a crawler or scraper—those are all synonyms—tries to access that content, they pay a fraction of a penny or a few pennies. It could be something that’s closer to a Spotify model, where maybe all the AI companies contribute to a pool and that pool gets aggregated and then [distributed]. In Spotify’s case, it’s based on how many minutes get listened to.
Exactly what the business model looks like, it’s going to take some time to mature. If you think about music, we ended up with Spotify, but in order to get to Spotify, we started with Napster, which was sort of anything goes, and then Steve Jobs steps onstage and launches iTunes, 99 cents a song, which was revolutionary at the time, but that wasn’t the business model that eventually won. The business model that eventually won was something closer to all you can eat for $10 a month.
My hunch is that we’re not going to get the business model right the first time around, and it may not be Cloudflare that figures it out. There are lots of people who are thinking about this problem. But no matter what, we have to start with scarcity. We’ve got to close the spigot.
And again, this isn’t just about media.
The same challenges are coming for e-commerce companies, travel companies—anyone who sells anything online. I’ve been struck by how many of the people who are calling us are saying, “Hey, this is a real problem for us too.” Big financial institutions where they’re like, “No, no, no, the AI companies are disintermediating us as well, and they’re creating a problem where our research teams aren’t getting compensated as much.” I mean, what’s the future for a Booking.com in an AI-powered world? What’s the future for anyone who in the past aggregated a bunch of supply together? What is a brand? What is it worth if it’s just agents that are interacting and you don’t have humans that are there? What I think people don’t fully appreciate is that this is a more radical transformation than it was to go to mobile. Fundamentally, we’re going to have to reinvent how we interact and that’s going to impact everyone.
Let’s close by going beyond the information ecosystem. Something I struggle with is how seriously to take the existential threat of AI—not to revenue models, but humanity itself. Very smart people argue very different ends of the spectrum, from the terrifying vision of Nate Soares and Eliezer Yudkowsky, whose book on the dangers of a superhuman AI is called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, to the much more sanguine outlook of folks like Yann LeCun, Meta’s chief AI scientist. Where do you fall on this spectrum?
I’m on the more optimistic side. More on Yann’s side. But I will say that I feel like this is a distraction from the real problems [we’re facing now]. Is there going to be a Terminator moment? We’ve got a lot of stuff to figure out before that. Sure, we can have cocktail party conversations about whether this is going to end the world or lead to kind of a utopia. But don’t let that conversation distract from the more important, more immediate conversation, which is who’s going to pay journalists going forward?
[Laughs] I agree: Nothing could be more important than that.
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