Cloudflare

Cloudflare reports that 57 percent of page views on its network now come from AI agents. These agents read and summarize content themselves, rarely direct people to original sources, and do not click on ads, which threatens ad revenue and journalism. The development increases the power of large cloud providers and raises questions about how to control the technology; Cloudflare is also exploring models in which agents pay for fetches. » More on faz.net

Deutsche Telekom and Cloudflare have resolved their years-long conflict over paid peering: both networks will be directly connected, and Telekom is enabling the direct network links. The agreement is not based on payments for peering but on a B2B sales partnership in which T‑Systems will sell Cloudflare’s security and zero-trust offerings to corporate customers. Previously, Telekom had restricted capacities, routing traffic over congested transit routes and causing higher latencies for German customers. » More on golem.de

CEO Matthew Prince says automated traffic now exceeds human traffic and warns AI agents will massively increase infrastructure costs, so Cloudflare is building technology to let publishers charge micropayments for bot access and to block or require identification from AI crawlers by default. The company sees a new internet business model where AI firms pay for high-quality content, and is working with payments players to revive a 402-style micropayment mechanism. Cloudflare also cut about 1,100 employees (roughly 20%) citing AI-driven productivity gains, reorganized around builders, sellers and measurers, flattened management and launched tools to measure and scale work with AI. Prince argues these moves aim to restore incentives for original information creation and sustain the web ecosystem. » More on theverge.com