Blocking AI crawlers to save the internet, with Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince

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1:34 With Russian hackers, Iranian hackers, North Korean hackers, Chinese hackers who are trying to get in and thwart our systems and get around it in various ways. The AI companies are a piece of cake in terms of blocking F is the real hackers that are out there. That's Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, the$60 billion tech firm that facilitates more than 20% of all online traffic.

2:05 Cloudflare just released a buzzy new tool that blocks AI crawlers from scraping content from websites. I wanted to talk to Matthew because Cloudflare's tool could have dramatic impact on AI firms, on news and content sites, and on the future of the internet. Plus, he has an insider's view on the state of cyber warfare right now in the age of AI. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare. Uh, Matthew, thanks for uh

2:44 being here. Thanks for joining us. Really happy. Appreciate you having me on. So and so I have to say, what Cloudflare does an internet infrastructure provider, it isn't always seen as the sexiest tech. But you do touch more than twenty percent of all online activity, right? You stand between website visitors and a website or an app itself managing Traffic and content so the experience is smoother. And faster and more secure. But recently you're you released a new tool that's got a lot of folks buzzing, a blocker for AI crawlers, the the the bots that scrape content from websites without their consent.

3:24 You've call this new tool the biggest thing you or the company has ever accomplished. You actually gathered your team atop the World Trade Center and and pushed a A big button to launch it. Yeah, I so um You know, I I I feel um incredibly fortunate to have have built what, you know, today is a sixty billion dollar company.

3:44 On the back of the internet. And we became Um, where about eighteen months ago Of a a new threat. And we'll we'll I'm sure talk about uh that but but to to the internet, to the web, to content creators.

3:57 Which was which was being posed by uh these AI companies, I don't I don't think intentionally, I don't think they're they're I think most of them are actually trying to do the right thing and out for preserving the ecosystem, but they they created this this real, real challenge. And so um when we realized that there was something we could do about it Um we spent about a year Talking to everyone in the content creation space, everyone sort of in the AI space.

4:21 We actually signed uh a lease on a new uh office space in New York, which is uh the top occupied floor. In the World Trade Center. And um We have a party and and at midnight we pushed

4:33 uh a big red button. Um it was me along with um really the the the leaders in the publishing um space. who recognized the the challenge that was there. Every publisher from the Associate Press to Ziff Davis and everything in between. we're gonna change the rules of the road and say that if you're not paying for content. Uh as an AI company, then you don't get that content.

4:55 And the and the the threat that that you saw that a lot of folks like me in journalism and media see that it was that sort of the uh the old bargain that you could crawl my site And then you'd send me traffic back, basically, that the the the AI companies, that's not really what their model is, right? the original deal that Google made with content creators was give us your content and then in exchange we'll send you traffic and you can

5:25 Great value with that traffic. Either you can sell something, the content itself, or or or a subscription to the content, or you know, a an e-commerce business that's on the side. You can sell ads against it. you can get value from just the ego of knowing that someone is consuming what you created. No one gets paid for editing Wikipedia. And we have really good data going back at least ten years on sort of how that Bargain has changed.

5:53 If you just look at Google. You saw it get about three times harder. Two actually generate traffic from the same sort of content that you created because Google changed the user interface.

6:06 They added an answer box at the top of the page. So if you type in, you know, when did Cloudflare launch? Instead of you having to click on one of the links to find the answer, it answered right on the page. And again, we could it it it's better for users. We shouldn't dispute Okay. Better for the Google user getting the answer right there than having to, you know

6:26 Like sort through documents. But It mean it meant the answer box made it three times harder to get traffic. They then in the last six months Added AI overviews.

6:38 And the AI overviews took the answer box and they they essentially put it on steroids. And so today it's almost 10 times harder. To get that actual traffic from Google for the same amount of content you created. And this isn't just Cloudflare data. Pew research just came out with a study that lines up exactly the same and says that the minute you show an AI overview, it's less likely that people click on links. And again, that is better for the Google user. But it is worse for the content creator because it means that you can't sell a subscription, you can't sell ads, and you can't even get the ego boost of knowing that people are reading your stuff. And that's the good news. Google is trending towards something that looks more like open AI. Today open AI is seven hundred and fifty times harder.

7:23 To get traffic from than the Google of old. Anthropic is thirty thousand times harder to get traffic from than the Google of old. And so if Publishing if content creation is struggling

7:36 Today at it being 10 times harder, I worry that it won't survive at seven hundred and fifty or thirty thousand times harder, where instead of reading original content, we're reading derivatives of that content. And if people don't have the incentive to create content, they're not going to create content. I mean r reporters need to eat, journalists need to eat, academics need to eat, researchers need to eat. So there needs to be some business model or at least some value creation model. um behind the future of the web. And it and it's not going to be around traffic because an AI driven web doesn't drive traffic. Well, and and the irony, right, is that the the AI itself needs the content that folks are creating to be able to make those answers and now, you know, the

8:19 Who knows where they're gonna get their answers from? That's the key. And eighty percent of the major AI companies use Cloudflare. uh in in in in their in their infrastructure. So we know them. Pretty well. And we have had over the course of the last Several months.

8:34 conversations about this. And what they have all said. Exceptions but but almost all the Is

8:43 We agree. Content creators need to get paid for content. But It has to be a level playing field. What nobody wants to do. is that they pay for content.

8:54 Where all of their competitors get it for free. Right. Or or the flip side where somebody gets it for free and everybody else has to pay. Because what you you ideally want. You want a lot of people creating content, but you also want a ton of different buyers. So you want to make sure that you know new startups can can participate, you know, established that have been in some other space aren't at a disadvantage to someone like Google. who's been able to, you know, crawl the internet, internet with impunity for an enormous amount of time. You want to make sure that someone who's hyper regulated like Google can still Compete.

9:26 with new startups. So that creating that level playing field is is incredibly important and and ensuring that there's a healthy ecosystem, if we can figure out how to do that, if we can figure out how to say, listen, We're everyone has to pay. The rules are the same and fair across the board for everyone. I'm encouraged that the AI companies have actually said yes and we're on board because ultimately we know that the fuel that fuels our engines, the thing that is critical is that original content that's out there. I mean just anthropic.

9:58 We'll scrape a site sixty thousand times. For every one visitor that's there. And what what's key is like that's real cost, right? Someone has to pay for that traffic. And so just just from a pure fairness perspective, they should be compensating creators that they're pulling that content from. Mm. blocker tool that that you came out with. Like

10:18 Is the tech itself hard fundamentally. I mean I'm I'm sure it's not easy, but like how much of it is about sort of the tech versus like the strategic decision that you guys made to like, all right, we're gonna challenge this, which seemingly no one else was trying to do. It's hard to say what's hard anymore. I mean, We process I mean something like twenty trillion internet requests a day. So which is just an inconceivable number. So just the mere fact that we do that is hard. And if if you think about who we go to war with, like what our primary business is, we we started as a cybersecurity company. And so like we go to war every day with Russian hacker

10:57 Iranian hackers, North Korean hackers, Chinese hackers who are trying to get in and thwart our systems and get around it in various ways. And so it was it was kind of funny. When we when we first started talking to publishers about this, like it was it was almost It was almost this sort of uh nihilistic kind of oh my gosh, what are we possibly gonna do? There's no way to stop it. These guys are so smart. They're a bunch of nerds. They're in Palo Alto. They we can't ever possibly block them. And I remember thinking Like

11:25 We block the North Koreans every day. And and and they're not subject to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. And they're not sub you know, they don't have a C corporation that you can sue, right? The AI companies are A piece of cake in terms of blocking versus the the real hackers that are out there. That said. I think the hard thing isn't the blocking. The hard thing is making sure that you're doing it in a way that creates level playing fields. Google is a huge challenge.

11:54 And here's why. Google has one bot. And that bot does five separate things. Um It does brand safety checks. So if you're Procter and Gamble, you don't want your ads being run against pornographic content or something like that. And so the bot checks a page to make sure it's not porn and then, you know, only

12:14 releases a proctor and gamble ad if it if it's not. So it does that. Does traditional search indexing. It does uh data mining for the answer box. It does data aggregation and collection for AI overviews. And it does training for Gemini. So it does uh one bot does all of these things. Five things. It's all in one.

12:35 Yeah, and they give you three different options today. They can say you block everything. But that sucks because now you're not in Google search results, right? Now you're not able to pr put any ads on on your pages because Google powers so much the ad ecosystem. You can allow everything. But that sucks because now your content is being taken from you and you're not getting any value exchange for those those three things for answer box, AI overviews, or Gemini. Or you can block Gemini, the fifth thing. They've actually given you the ability to block that that one thing and not block the other other four. What we think is we need to create really a a taxonomy.

13:11 And and an industry standard on what responsible crawling is. And that's super hard. But we're working with standard organizations like the IETF to set down what those those standards are. And we're very hopeful because you know, if Google is sort of the the hard case, on the other side, who's doing this really responsibly is Open AI. Like open AI. says okay we have one bot for training, we have a different bot for search. We distinguish between those things. We publish clearly who our bot is. They've been willing to go into actually cryptographically signing that their bot is their bot. So that we can, you know, tell that it's someone's not forging it or something else. They follow the sort of the um the equivalent of like the street signs uh that that are out there. And they call it a reasonable rate. And and again, I think that that

13:57 That's a very good example of a company that is trying to do the right thing. And Before you release this this first round of this tool, because clearly you're continuing to develop it. Um Did you like give the AI companies

14:14 A heads up or some of them. I mean, some of them are are clients, but but I can imagine that su there are some AI companies that are like, uh, how do we get around this new tool? You know, I think there are some bad actors out there. And and I think it'll surprise some people who the bad actors are. Some some of them won't be surprises. Like but but there are there are some some folks who who basically if they can't get through one way, they try a bunch of other things that start to resemble the North Koreans do. Now we again are really good at this. So we're tracking them, we're monitoring them, and very soon Um, we will publish and we will name and shame. Who is actually a bad actor in this space. And and we will take from what has been basically posting a speed limit sign that says, you know, don't drive more than

14:56 Fifty five miles an hour. We'll take that speed limit sign that we have that we put up on July first, and we'll make it into something that is actually much more strict, where we're saying, listen, you're we're we're taking away your car. We're not allowed to drive on the road anymore. And that we do that, I think we're gonna highlight some of the companies that are doing it right. Because you want to actually say these are companies that are good actors that are out there. And so as we start to separate the good actors from the bad actors and and By and f by far. Most of the AI companies are actually good actors. There are a handful that are doing some pretty shady stuff. And again, we'll shut it down and and and hopefully they'll reform. I understand you're exploring sort of a pay per crawl model with some of the content publishers, which to me sounds a little bit like a toll on the on the highway there, right? That you have to pay a toll if you want to come through.

15:41 Well again g uh uh just Simple first principles. If you are generating a huge amount of cost by crawling somebody But you're not getting them giving them any benefit. Then step one is block them.

15:55 But if that's still val if that's valuable to you, then once you've created scarcity. Then there can be a market. Right. There's already a lot of content that AI companies are paying for. Open AI, again, is is one of the more responsible players in the industry from everything that we've has done deals with a lot of content providers saying we'll pay for the content. But

16:16 Like Sam can't be a sucker. He can't be like, I'm paying for it, but all my competitors get it for free. And so I think that comes back to why the reception from the AI companies was actually a lot more positive. Than than people might assume. Because What everyone wants everyone agrees is the ecosystem has to be healthy. Not again, almost everyone agrees. A couple of bad actors, but almost everyone agrees the ecosystem has to be healthy. There has to be some compensation for taking content. It's not gonna be traffic anymore. It's gonna be something else. Now the question is, okay, how do you pay? And I think a lot of times big AI companies and big publishers are just gonna negotiate deals themselves. So if you're conde nast, you go out and do an open AI deal or a Google deal or something else.

16:55 And you can negotiate it yourself. I uh we don't have any we again, we can provide the blocking technology, but we don't have any role in that. I think for the smaller AI companies or for the long tail of publishers that cloud can hopefully sit in between and help negotiate what is the best deal. And that we don't know exactly what that will look like yet. It could be a you know, uh a micro payment every time a page is accessed. It could be something that's closer to a Spotify model where you know there's pool of funds and that gets distributed out all to all of the different content providers. I I I I don't know that will develop, but step one in any market has to be scarcity. If you don't have scarcity, you don't have a market. Mm-hmm and these the bad actors that you that you refer to, I know you're not prepared yet to to name them, but are these like Like

17:41 Companies that are non US companies, you know, China and other places, or or these are these are there. Yeah, we we have we have some very bad actors that are venture backed, you know, you know, very very successful. Um Uh uh companies and we have reached out to them directly and said, listen, we see you doing this. You gotta stop, or we're gonna shut down your access to the roads. And we know a lot of their investors, we reach out to their investors. And and we give him every possible chance. And so now we're we're at the final stage. Next step is name and shame them and and and and again I that's not something that

18:16 that I'm excited about doing. But I do think that we've gotta get we have to establish this level playing field. Let's just acknowledge that Matthew is really poking the bear here in challenging how AI companies operate, going after the hottest players in tech who are driving global markets and the global economy. But change is necessary, at least from my perspective, in media as a content creator. So what will the internet business models of the future look like? We'll talk about that after the break.

18:50 Stay with us. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi.

19:10 And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely.

19:55 From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Before the break, Cloudflare's Matthew Prince talked about a new tool to block AI companies from crawling content sites. Now he talks about what a new business model for the internet might look like, how cyber warfare is shifting in the age of AI, plus his plea for fixing U immigration policy. We begin with Matthew's take on where internet business models and incentives are moving to, and whether it's likely to be as robust as what we've had in the past. Let's jump back in.

20:45 I'm encouraged by Analogous. Markets that have developed. Before before Steve Jobs launches 99 cents per song with iTunes. The music industry was about an eight billion dollar industry.

21:01 terms of what their annual revenue was. If you just look at Spotify, last year Spotify distributed ten billion dollars. Two musicians. And so Even though I mean even though everyone thought, Oh, digital's gonna kill the music industry, it actually ended up being pie expanding.

21:18 And so I'm actually optimistic. All of us are gonna have subscriptions to a certain number of AI agents that are out there. that that that revenue that goes to the AI companies, some portion of it has to go to GPUs, some portion of it has to go to AI researchers, some portion of it has to go to, you know, your your other overhead, but some portion of it should also go to content companies and content creators. And and my my prediction is that the algorithms And that GPUs will turn out to be commodity commodities largely. And that how AI companies will differentiate themselves is access to unique content that they have and they have alone. So imagine Taylor Swift is about to release a new album.

21:57 And she does an interview with some journalists and They are willing to give that interview. To one AI company exclusively for a week. How much is that worth? Probably quite a bit.

22:10 Right. People are gonna sign up if you haven't. It's like if Netflix is willing to spend tons of move money to produce movies, like there's going to be value in actually creating unique content that your AI has that another AI doesn't have. And so I'm actually optimistic. That we might be at a golden age, the precipice of a golden age of content creation. If we do this right and we think and we get the incentives right, it might be that instead of us all sort of worshiping sort of the deity that Google taught us to worship, which is traffic, which has always been a really bad proxy for value. If instead we find a way to compensate creators based on when they actually create something which is which is worthwhile and advances human knowledge that that we can actually do some real good in the world at the same time that we help the content creators get paid more.

23:01 I I I hope you're right, Matthew. I sure do,'cause it it does sound like the w the world I wanna I wanna live in. They think about everything that's wrong with the world today. Like and again, I don't care whether you're Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal. Like no matter what, we've gotten more polarized. We've gotten more anxious.

23:20 Um, we we we it everything feels urgent and and panicky and and if you ask like why is that the case? This is gonna be too strong a statement and I and I risk pissing my friends at Google off, but Sort of it's all Google's fault. Right.

23:35 I I think Google has been a net positive for the universe. I think they're they're good, but they did teach us all to worship this deity of traffic. The question is, how do you get traffic? And so there was a whole series of companies that came along, the Huffington Posts and BuzzFeeds and and others of the world, where they would create a piece of content and they would literally beta test. Different headlines for which ones created the largest cortisol response, the largest stress response in readers, because that was the thing that was most likely to get a click. I don't know that that's good for the world. And again, Google just started it. Facebook took it to the next level. TikTok is now taking it to a whole nother level. But that world in which we are just trying to stimulate a cortisol response, and that's what success in media is, I think is really, really, really dangerous. If on the other hand You think about all of the AI

24:27 companies that are out there. Um It's not a perfect representation, but it's a pretty good representation of a map of what human knowledge looks like. And and I picture it like a big block of Swiss cheese, right? So big block of Swiss cheese, lots of cheese, but lots of holes.

24:44 In that cheese. If we could actually help AI companies say, okay, and and and this isn't this is actually a technically solvable problem. When a new piece of content comes out, if we say hey Does this sort of just add more cheese to where we are I have cheese or does this help fill a hole?

25:00 We can say that you get compensated more by filling those holes. I think that's actually the way that you advance human knowledge. My again, my uh I think Spotify has done some just amazing things. One of the things they do is they actually publish. A list of queries That people have typed into Spotify of music they want to hear. Uh that they don't give

25:20 very satisfactory answers to I don't know, a disco uh about how much fun it is to dance with your cat. Like there's no songs out there like that. They post a list.

25:33 And there are music creators out there that look at that list and they write song based on what people are searching for that this sort of this unmet need in the market. And they make tens of millions of dollars a year. Writing songs based on un you know, unsatisfactorily sat uh searched. Spotify queries. If we can get to that place where again, instead of us thinking, how do we write content with just

26:00 you know, is yet another story about What crazy things are happening in politics or how You know, w w wh whatever it is that makes makes people just, you know, get up in arms and click on things. If instead we can say, what is it where there's an unmet human need to advance human knowledge? And we can reward content creators for that. Like I think that could again be uh the the golden age of content creation. You you mentioned earlier that your your heritage at at Cloudflare is from cybersecurity. I I wanna ask you about the the topic of cyber warfare. I mean, wars today, they emerge in cyberspace before they're on the battlefield. We've seen that in Ukraine. Um

26:41 Y your detection tools have been utilized in a lot of these situations, right? Like are you a partner in these cyber battles? Yeah, I mean I think we're um We're we're a defensive partner. We don't provide any we don't we don't we we don't make bullets but we make shields and we see things That are in dish uh of of attack. So back in December of twenty twenty one, we started to see the indiction of what

27:05 Russia does before they launch attacks. And unfortunately we have experience with that with Georgia, with Crimea, with um with Syria. Um, and so we we kinda know what their playbook is. And so we can start to see, oh, they're probing in this way. And I felt a little bit like Chicken Little, where for a while we were running around being like the Russians are about to attack Ukraine, the Russians are gonna attack Ukraine and a lot of government officials were like, No, they're not. Um But but thankfully we were able to get connected uh with the Ukrainians. Um we provided our services at no cost. uh to a bunch of their critical infrastructure.

27:37 And when the Russians did attack in in February of twenty twenty two, um we were able to keep a lot of the Ukrainian internet on online and and And and again, the we we were one small player in a in a in a in a huge effort. I I thought that the next move from Russia after attacking Ukraine would be to go after their Western allies. And there was a little of that, but nothing near what we what we expected, which would have been a a much larger and broader attack. It actually wasn't r Russia's um cyberattacks didn't really pick up until something that seems completely unrelated happened, which was

28:15 the Hamas attack on um on Israel. Um when that happened. All of a sudden you saw a whole bunch of Russian attacks that were that were trying to look Like they were actually Hamas attack. They were sort of hiding behind that. And I think the reason for that is Every country is enormously vul vulnerable to cyberattacks. Um Russia's entire power grid could be knocked offline.

28:37 by by by the US if if if if they wanted to. And so there needs to be in the cyber um war a little bit of plausible deniability. And so it it r it required this other It's other war to start. before kind of launder their attacks through that. And so we've definitely seen an increase in in Russian attacks. We can attribute it back, but they are they're making some effort to make it look like it's coming coming out of these other other places. The rise of AI tools, like is that making Cybersecurity tougher? Or is it just mostly showing up in the robocalls on my phone and the spam emails I'm seeing in my inbox? Or is it or is it everywhere?

29:13 The the attackers are getting better because of the tools. Um but the defenders are getting better faster because of the tools. machine learning algorithms, they were pretty good at finding things we already knew about. But they they weren't good at identifying new threats that no one had ever seen before. Starting about two and a half years ago, they started identifying threats that no human had ever identified before. That's now something that's happening on a very regular basis internally at Cloudflare. That doesn't mean that there aren't gonna be horrible things that happen because of AI. But

29:43 On balance, I think the internet is safer because of AI, not less safe. Mm-hmm. Cloudflare, you started as a project at Harvard Business School, right? Now How do you feel about the troubles Harvard's having with the Trump administration. Should Harvard be expecting uh successful alums like you to donate and fill their research and their funding gaps?

30:08 I have to confess I am not an expert in academia and and anything that's going on. I've and I've kind of, you know, again, I harv Harbor's great to us. I will say that um You know, my my co founder, Michelle, um Michelle's a Canadian. And back in the Obama administration, like w she was she had come to uh V US on a student visa. She was allowed to stay after graduation for a limited period of time, but we had to apply For her.

30:31 uh to be able to um you know stay stay in the country. And it was really, really hard. And she came this close. Getting kicked out of the country. And had that happened, Cloudflow wouldn't exist. And so I do think that as we as we think through these things from my very micro, you know, perspective, Making sure that we have paths For the Michelles of the World.

30:53 Who've created I mean thousands and thousands and thousands of jobs directly in the United States. Yeah. Advanced, you know, enormous amounts of shareholder value. We've gotta make sure that as we as we fight whatever the kind of uh you know, other wars are, w whether you c cultural or political or whatever, that we that we make sure that uh folks like Michelle can still come here and succeed. And I think that's a superpower. of the US. If if the US wanted to

31:21 completely and totally like annihilate China. Like if that if we decided that that was our goal, and I'm not saying it is. The most effective thing that we could do. is offer. Done.

31:33 Uh Admission. And scholarships. Plus Essentially green cards.

31:39 to the to the family's Of the top Ranked. Um Students

31:46 Coming out of Chinese Like education, they would all flock to the United States. They would all stay in the United States and they would all create value in the United States. And because of how hierarchical the Chinese system is, you would you would eliminate a bunch of the of future leadership. of of the Chinese government the fact that we make it difficult for really, really, really talented Um entrepreneurs

32:08 or or researchers or or whatever to stay here and create value here. That that worries me me a lot. Philosophically, a lot of leaders today are sort of struggling to envision the future in twenty twenty five because So much is changing so fast. How much do you think about Cloudflare sort of shaping the future versus having to adapt to what comes?

32:33 There's this uh Almost two hour long interview with Steve Ballmer. And I think that struck me the most was um You know, how even in Sort of uh

32:45 two thousand when the Justice Department comes after Microsoft and everything, how they were still very much thought of themselves as the little guy. You know, folks at Google will be like, Oh my gosh, we can't do that because we'd get crushed. Like, you're Google. Like what how are you possibly thinking that way? I I I think we still continue to fall into that. You know, w we we don't realize quite the the the the impact that we could have on things. I think we're always surprised. Like when we did paper crawl and and it

33:12 It did feel like the industry shifted. I think internally we were actually quite surprised. Like we there are plenty of times we do things and then Yeah, it's crickets. We back in. Twenty twenty we launched with this Graphics Chips Company. uh a initiative where we would put

33:29 GPUs at the edge of our network so that people could do AI inference. And nobody picked it up. It was it was complete total crickets. Uh the geographics chip company, I don't know if you've heard of a company called Nvidia. Yeah. Now four years later, it turned out the market was ready for it. We we literally just dusted off the same press release, issued it again and we're like, Hey by the way, we've GPUs at the edge of our network. Um but so so again, I you know, it it's not I I I still think we very much feel like we're adapting. But I actually think that that's how Google feels. I think it's how Microsoft feels. I think it's how Meta feels. I think everybody They are nervous about the decisions that they make.

34:04 Um they don't they they they don't have nearly the sort of um degrees of freedom and control that you might you might think that they do. I I think mostly we're just kind of feel like the world is happening and we have to Tack and adjust to whatever it does. Well, um well, Matthew, this uh this was great. Thank thanks so much for doing it. Absolutely. Thank you for uh thank you for having me on.

34:26 When Matthew talks about Cloudflare and Google and Meta and others hustling to adapt to the pace of change, It's a reminder to the rest of us that today's chaotic environment isn't easy for anyone. At the same time, at least when it comes to blocking AI crawlers, few companies are pushing to consciously shape the future the way Cloudflare seemingly is right now. I'm struck by how Matthew and his team are using case studies from the likes of iTunes and Spotify to find models for the next chapter. The past may not repeat itself, but getting inspiration from previous challenges can provide valuable inspiration. You've got to dream it to build it, and Cloudflare is definitely dreaming big. I'm Bob Safian.

35:14 Thanks for listening. Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Alex Morris. Associate producer is Mashumaku Tonina. Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastanelli. Our theme music is by Ryan Holiday.

35:42 Our head of podcasts is Le Cal Malad. For more, visit rapidresponsehow.com.

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