For decades, publishers have done everything in their power, from the legal to the not-explicitly illegal, to rank as highly in Google Search as possible. For many websites, traffic from the search engine was their single greatest source of audience and, as a result, revenue.
Now though, a handful of influential players in the digital media ecosystem have begun moving in the opposite direction, laying the groundwork for what was once unthinkable: removing themselves from Google Search.
Beginning Sept. 15, all new websites signing up for Cloudflare, as well as all the customers on its free tier, will have the default settings in their bot management protocol set to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any webpage that has ads. This means that any crawler that scrapes for both search indexing and AI training will be turned away at the door, unless the site owner decides otherwise.
“We’ve been clear about what we want,” said Cloudflare chief strategy officer Stephanie Cohen. “We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”
You can, in fact, legislate to enact a better status quo. America has a history of civil rights laws that demonstrate as much.
You don’t have to “legislate the world” to make some positive change.
Ah, one of those believe in the system guys. The US history on civil rights is one of horror and oppression.
While I agree with your points and sentiment, the US civil rights laws (including the Civil Rights Act) are being continuously torn apart by billionaires and religious lunatics, so maybe not the best example.
Regardless, there are plenty of examples of laws succeeding in bettering the status quo going even as far back as Babylon.