they don’t outright block ai crawlers. they added some new tools and options for managing or blocking ai bot traffic which the cloudflare customer can choose to use or to not use.
im running a free educational resource and i let the crawlers hit my site all they want because its useful knowledge unavailable anywhere else and it’s served to them from cloudflare’s free tier cache. i just don’t know why they have to read it ten thousand times a day.
you’re being downvoted but this is the reality of the market right now. it’s day 1 venture capital shit. lose money while gaining market share, and worry about making a profit later.
people currently don’t pay for it, because currently it’s free. most people aren’t using it for anything that requires a subscription.
that’s a cool 2025 headline
no. it all depends on the vps provider. linode for example has sent me emails about detecting torrent traffic, and threatens to end my service. if a government asked them for logs, i assume they would send them right over.
the day that these guys need to turn a profit will be the day that a lot of people lose access to this sort of thing
maybe in the future a service offers a flat monthly fee to not have any ads and distributes the money to all of the content platforms that would otherwise show ads. basically it’s like a little government taxing users and giving the money to the capital owning class all over again