Pibisi podcast on suurin järjestelmä. Tiedän ajan liittymä turvallisellaan, että itse asiassa on lauksella. Hyvää päivää. Hei, kannattaa kannata. Skannaamalla Lidolplussoveluksen saattelunastettua meidän mainiot kuponkiedut. Ei, ke! Nysianus kannatta, mutta sanopasettaa skannattaa kokonuttaa itselleen tarjousaukka. Siis, mitä? Skannaamalla Lidolplussoveluksessa. Tarjousaukkoille ja muille. Tämä on tosi, että on saa minkä, että on koko kivuus. Tämä on kivuus. Tämä on kivuus. Ei, että minä tämän onko, mutta on käyä. Tämä on kivuus, että on kivuus. Tämä on kivuus. Tämä on kivuus. Tämä on kivuus. Or just again, as you said, a lot of the content online is done. Just because you want to know that what you're putting out in the world is actually being consumed. And so, my wife and I own a small newspaper. Our writers don't get paid based on how many people read their articles. But they're all obsessed with how many page views am I getting? How many people are coming and reading my thing? Because that's part of what's important about being a content creator. The writer is George Orwell, who I suppose you could call a content creator in his seminar, SAYI, right? My initial concern is to get a hearing. That's right. You don't write to be an vacuum of a void. You write to be read. And I think that that's just part of the experience that we've had online. And that deal that you would put content out there in an exchange. You could either make money or you could get famous from having done that. That deal is what has generated the internet that we have today. But that deal is changing. And you can actually see it by just watching any SAYI movie. Some SAYI movie you imagine has a helpful robot. And you say I'd like a recipe for cookies. The robot doesn't come back and say, "Here are 10 links and maybe you can find it somewhere." The robot comes back and says, "Here's your recipe for cookies." And that once upon a time was science fiction. But if you look at the AI companies today, you look at something like ChatGPT, you look at Anthropic, you look even at what Google is becoming where they're putting AI overviews at the top of the page, instead of giving you a treasure map, instead of it being a search engine, this is becoming an answer engine. And the difference of that is that if you want to say, "Okay, what did Amal talk about on his podcast today?" The answer engine will tell you. But there's no human who has had to go and actually listen to your podcast. There's a commercial consequence of that, which is that the lack of traffic means that all those people can't monetize the reach. There's also just a sort of almost a neurological consequence, which is that you're not having to do anything. AI overview is kind of giving you an answer. And previously, if you wanted to work out when CloudFlair was set up, you might go to the CloudFlair website, you might go to Wikipedia, you might go to others. You might do some thinking. And of course, if most humans, or most of human history would suggest if humans can opt out of doing some thinking, they're quite keen to do that. But how did you come to realise that this was a growing phenomenon? And actually, the complaints people were maybe making to you, which is, "Hey Matthew, I'm using your stuff, but people aren't coming to me as much as I used to." Suddenly, you realise, they're telling the truth. Yeah, I think that, so first of all, I think you're right that this is exactly, it is inevitable that this is going to be a case. Because again, whether you're thinking or not, you're getting the answer faster, and you're getting to what you want a little bit faster. And that, for 95% of users, 95% of the time, is a better experience. It's convenient. And so people are going, this is what the future is going to look like. I don't think we can hold back progress. There are going to be answer engines, and they're going to replace search engines. And that's what the future is going to look like. What we started here, because we have so many clients, is at first media companies coming to us and just saying, "We're getting killed." And our business primarily is to protect against cyber attacks, the Chinese or the Russians or the North Koreans or the Iranians, hacking folks. And so when they were like, "We have this new threat," and it's AI companies, my first reaction was, "Oh God, it's media companies. They're just complaining about new technology again. There's such luttites." Like, "What's your list?" "Let us?" "Seriously." "You're in the BBC now, Vossi. Yeah." And so, I think that that was my first reaction. And company after company after company said, "Just go pull this."
the data. And so we did. And people may not totally understand how search engines work. But the way that they work is essentially they have a little robot or what might be called a crawler or a bot that's going around and visiting everything on the internet. And so Google, every day is making billions of requests to access all of the content of the internet. And it gets a copy of everything that has been created and then uses that to build an index, which is what is what the search engine is. And then when you search, it returns the results that you see. And so the deal has been that you let Google copier content in exchange for appearing in their treasure map. That they have visibility. That's right. And so we can see for the last 10 years what the ratio of how much Google crawls that content Google takes it versus how many page views, how many visitors they actually send you. And the ratio 10 years ago was they crawled two pages for every one visitor that they sent you. So they crawled to they sent you one visitor over that period of time that has gotten much, much worse. So today it's up to almost 20 to one. They crawl 20 pages for everyone visitor. What's changed? AI overviews because that then says I don't have to click on anything. I don't have to go anywhere. I get the answer right there. And that's the good news for publishers. If you look at folks like open AI with chat GPT, they're at 1500 crawls for everyone visitor that they send you. If you look at something like anthropic, it's 40,000 crawls for everyone visitor to send you. And just from a fairness perspective, like that's putting that's that's cost to the BBC. That's cost to content creators. They have to pay for all of that crawled content. And yet they're not getting anything in exchange. They're not getting the traffic. And the world over time is going to move to these answer engines. And as it does, it means that the deal that content creators have with them, it has to change. So the the word that is you talk about the way in which the world is moving. The world is moving towards a kind of answer engine rather than search engine. That's right. Because chat GPT which is you know, chat GPT was the moment that really crystallized and a lot of people's minds because consumers used it. The AI is a real thing. It's not just some weird Silicon Valley chat. It's and it's grown extraordinarily. I think it's up to 800 million miles. And all this is out of nowhere and astonishing thing. If you know said to me, if you know, we're going to launch a product in this room today, you said in a couple of years time, 800 million people be using it every month. You say that's basically unprecedented. But it works because the product is good. That's right. Dario Amade, the boss of anthropic was on this program. I did put this particular point to them. But what they would say is A, they can play with all the regulations and all the laws that they're required to. B, they often do credit the sources where they get this information from. So if you use Claude, which is the chatbot from anthropic, when it's kind of you've asked, you know, when it was Cloudflare set up or how good looking is a more urgent, they will kind of have a little thing where they say where they're searching the web and they might give you some sources. They are still in their view providing some visibility to people who otherwise might not get it. That's the opposition. Sure. And again, I think we can't dispute that these products are good that form a lot of people. You're sure? Yeah. They're providing real value. But the problem is you need to eat, right? Something needs, there needs to be some business model where content creators are compensated for what they are delivering. And if, if it's not going to be from traffic, it needs to be from something else. And I think there's, you know, there are sort of three possible futures that we could have. The bleakest is you starve to death and die, right? Because nobody is actually paying you to create content anymore because it's just getting all sucked up into the answer engines. I think that's pretty unlikely because the answer engines need the content. It is incredibly valuable for them to have that content. It's the fuel that actually makes these things run. And so in the end, they've got an incentive to make sure that we can feed ourselves. That's exactly right. So I think the good news is journalists, academics, researchers, there's a business model. It's going to be a different business model, but a business model will emerge. So what are the possibilities for that? I think that they, the sort of black mirror potential future, which is really scary because I think it's, it's pretty likely is that instead of there being hundreds of thousands of independent content creators that we don't go back to a media time of 30 years ago, we actually go back to a media time of the 1400s, the Mediches, where there are five powerful families. And if you want to paint the cysteine chapel, you've got to be associated with one of those families. But instead of them being families, there'll be AI companies. And again, there will be a liberal one, there'll be a conservative one, there'll be a Chinese one. And you can imagine that they will be the ones who decide what content gets created. There will essentially be the patrons of content creation. And it's not crazy to think about like how can you imagine Sam Altman from open AI deciding to stand up his own version of the associated press? A lot of out of, at a work journal is these days would cost not not that much relative to what they're spending on GPUs or or AI. The general processing units, which is what pilots, that's right. That's the silicon that is there where there's literally spending $10 billion a year. You could have a new, right? A lot of newspapers, for $10 billion a year. And, and, and, and that I think is actually a really potential outcome that we have. But think about how regressive that is. If the internet was all about democratizing information, about spreading it, making accessible to anyone, making it so that everyone could go in, in, in any direction. If all of a sudden content gets siloed behind a small handful of different AI companies, and the, your view of the world is completely dictated by which one you are subscribed to. That, I think is it actually an even more polarized and even more dangerous world than the one that we're living in. So that's the bleak outlook if I'm right. What are the other two potential snows you see? Well, so that, there's the, you don't eat outlook. That's the bleakest. There's the black mirror outlook, which is we go back to sort of these five, you know, powerful AI companies that control that. I think the, what we're trying to play for is something else, which is, okay, traffic isn't going to be the currency anymore. It has to be something else. And so how do we create incentives where the AI companies say, you know, we need to pay content creators for the content that they're creating in order for our systems to have access to it. And, and there needs to be some value exchange where if you are creating content that you're not going to get as much ad revenue, you're not going to get as much subscription revenue. But let's create a new source of, of revenue, which is some fraction of every person who's subscribing to an AI company, some fraction that goes back to the content creators, which is the fuel that makes those AI companies work. So that, so for the last, well, for the best, maybe six and a half years, I covered technology for the BBC. And one of the central stories of the time, this is in a, rather type of huge concerns about whether, you know, content moderation came down to you influence and all that. So I think one of the big arguments was between publishers and these platforms, you said, but it's a publisher's Rupert Murdoch's company, classically, news corp in America, news UK in the UK would say, Facebook and Google, you're stealing our stuff. Yep. You're stealing, we pay the journalists, we train them up, we hire them, we pay them to go out and get the stuff. And you're stealing our stuff and you should down well pay us for it. And Facebook, I know I was in the middle of this argument, and Facebook would say to them, and to me, we're not stealing our stuff, we don't need their stuff, by the way, news is a tiny fraction of what's on Facebook, most of Facebook is pictures of your grandma or your mom or your cat. Yep. And we're helping them by providing them with a window, which sends them a lot of traffic, which makes them relevant in this new world. Now, that argument never quite got settled, but it's an extension of the logic that you've just articulated that, if you're a news publisher concerned about Facebook ripping off your stuff and not entirely persuaded that being on Facebook's news feed or in Google search is sufficient payment, if you're a news publisher, you've got to be infinitely more worried about the coming world, that's right, where you've got to be saying to anthropic who are in charge of Claude and Darryl Amarday or Sam Altman at OpenAI, you've got to pay for our content. Absolutely. Because if you don't, you've got nothing and we've started to death. That's why we're beginning to see some deals, aren't we? Where people at Rupert Monarchs companies coming forward and saying, "You need to pass." What's your sentence of whether or not that new world, that good outcome that you want to see happen, is beginning to emerge? Yeah. So the argument that the news corpse of the world made against the Facebooks and Google's actually always kind of rang hollow to me because they were at least sending traffic back. They were generating that now, was it as much traffic as they would have gotten before or they were at some level, disintermediating the relationship with the reader or the viewer? Maybe, but the threat that the AI companies pose is so much larger. Again, 40,000 copies of your stuff for every one visitor they send you back. That's supposed to be two to one. That is the real threat. So that argument that was before, I would have to have much sympathy too, but this one I think is a real existential threat to the publishers first, but actually to a lot of other businesses as well. What people don't.
appreciate is that AI is really a platform change. So if we start with the web and then after the web we had social and then after social we had mobile. Each of those were platform changes. They were changing the interface through which you consumed information. So back in one spot of time I've been on your laptop and then it was through the social media site and then it was through your mobile phone and apps on your phone and each of those was a platform for the change it was possible for people to see. What I don't think people appreciate is AI is a similar platform change where in the future the way that you're going to get information is you're going to ask your helpful chatbot and we're already seeing people move to that. What's different though about this platform is that this is a platform with an opinion for the first time and what that's going to do is it's going to sit between you and yes media companies first but what happens to anyone who what happens to a booking.com like what value do they have anymore anyone who's aggregating information together what happens to a brand like what do brands mean in a world where you tell your agent hey go buy me eggs or go buy me milk or go buy me something like that there's there's no there's no relationship between you as the human and what were effectively shortcuts for quality which is what brands are this is a genetic AI which for some of our listeners is an idea rather than a reality what is the kind of a genetic AI i.e. kind of your chatbot friend what are the sorts of things you're getting your agent AI do at the moment you think more more of our listens to be doing I mean I think it's you're already being able to do things like how do I pull together a family vacation you know where should we stay where should we eat what what activity should we do and right now for the most part that's just pulling together here's it and then you have to go out and buy it but it is an inevitable step that the agent will then do that buying for you and again that's good that's an amazing experience but it's also going to change fundamentally business models and so what I think is encouraging about this is traffic which is the business model that the internet has been built on so far has always been a really poor proxy for quality like there's a lot of things something in a car wreck on the side of the road like we all stop and stare at it that's that's not good like that's not that's not us at our best whereas what we're seeing from AI is that AI is actually for the first time in human history created effectively a mathematical model of all of human knowledge right and at the same time it has also shown us where there are gaps and holes in human knowledge right where they're yeah picture like a giant block of Swiss cheese right there's a lot of cheese but there's a lot of holes in the cheese and going forward if we can if the business model of content creation business model many things is about to significantly change as the platform of AI shifts to how we consume information how we shop how we do everything online as we do that there's an opportunity for us to fix some of the problems of the last business model where again traffic and a lot of how media organizations have made money today is writing headlines that make us angry that make us have to click on them that divide us apart whereas if you imagine a future where the business model is how do we find those holes in the cheese and we actually fill them and the people who create that content get rewarded that's actually a really optimistic future so what is the mechanism by which which is very hopeful idea by which artificial intelligence could break the link between traffic you know it's not traffic being seen as a quality for yeah a proxy for quality and AI could actually promote more intelligent material so the best thing I've kind of come up with is is an analogy to when other parts of media were really disrupted I like the Swiss cheese analogy which is good but but look at the music industry so 22 years ago before Steve Jobs steps on stage and launches iTunes 9.9 cents a song the entire music industry the market cap that how much it was worth was about eight billion us dollars which is a lot of money but I mean that's that's the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and I mean that's everything eight billion dollars and at the time piracy was rampant people were just sort of saying music is is is getting devalued yet Napster yet all these things and then Apple launches iTunes 9.9 cents a song says we're going to compete with the pirates when it come up with a new business model turns out that's not the business model that ends up winning but you kind of have to go through that stage in order to get to Spotify Spotify is you know closer to you know 10 pounds a month and all you can eat access to things and Spotify alone last year sent 10 billion dollars us dollars two music creators around the world and they're and that's just Spotify there's also Apple music and title and YouTube and TikTok so there is wait the music industry is worth way more because technology has invented this new business model for it than it was than it was before and there are different winners and losers and you can you can there are people who are angry at Spotify because they say well we should be being paid more or last but but you can't dispute the fact that there is more money going into creating music today than there was just 20 years ago and so I flew up to Stockholm to meet with Daniel Ak who's the founder of Spotify no one has compensated creators at scale like Daniel it's just incredible and I was talking to him and he told me the story that that is just stuck with me which is that you know if you're on Spotify and you search for Taylor Swift shake it off like they know they're going to return like a result that is what you're looking for on the other hand if you search for something like I want a song to a disco beat about how much fun it is to dance through cat they don't have much but they know they don't have that much they know that they've effectively found one of the holes in the cheese and so what they do is they actually take that query and they publish it back to music creators and there are several like many music creators that are making millions of dollars a year that you told me about one guy is making 40 million euros a year just writing songs for unfulfilled Spotify queries and I think that's beautiful because when you search for a song what you're searching for is an emotion and if you can't find it then there's sort of a hole that's left and these people are actually writing content to fill those holes and I think that that provides the beginnings of the ingredients for how we can remake the media industry in an age of AI to say what's really valuable is filling in the holes in the cheese and that's I think the beginning of how how we figure this out is and what I'm encouraged by is if you talk to the founders of Anthropic if you talk to the founders of OpenAI if you talk to Google if you talk to you know Microsoft what they want is very reputable very unique trustworthy and that's yeah and that and but it's not just trust it's also uniqueness it takes us to a quite remarkable decision that you've made as the co-founder and boss of Cloudflare to restrict the access of AI bots to websites that you are a critical part of the infrastructure of before we get to that decision how you came to that decision and the consequences of it I think it's just worth going back and briefly telling the story of your company it's been 15 years multi billion dollar revenue you're the critical infrastructure for between 20 and 25% of the internet I don't know why I'm quoting these numbers back at you 3,500 employees roughly 45 and 45 hundred citizens and what did you do that last podcast I listened to operating much of the world and every single day there are more people I mean if all the Cloudflare uses daily in the world got together it would be a very big country right yeah we see about 6 billion people pastor network every month which is essentially the entire online population what do you do what do I have to Cloudflare do we make the internet faster and protect from bad guys and so when we're doing our job right your internet just seems a little bit faster you're what you're you're less likely to get scammed online and we and we protect yeah most of our customers are are either content creators or companies that are putting something making it accessible online and then their customers are the ones that flow through our network to be able to access whatever they're on and you as a company 15 years ago you're above a nail salon in Palo Alto which is just Nissan Francis codes heart Silicon Valley they're eight of you back then you've grown extraordinarily big and you are in ways that I was sort of checking out in in advance of our conversation deeply mission driven you know part of what you do actually came about from a meeting that you had with three journalists I think yeah from the community to protect journalists and one was from Angola one was from Ethiopia one couldn't say where they're from that's right they're getting followed by death squads the first meeting I'd ever been in that the term death squad yeah I had been used unfortunately not the last and I think you I think you say goodbye to these journalists in a sort of cab outside New York and you kind of turn around maybe to your co-founder because I think the meeting with Emmett been slightly longer than you anticipated and you sort of thought this is what we're about we're about getting the internet to people who are going otherwise it was any it was the being a journalist in a lot of parts of the world is a really dangerous profession very easy sat in the West to pretend the you know to moan about it but at least we're free to report what we want that's right and and these journalists recovering uh government corruption in their uh home countries and there were a lot of people that wanted to silence them and they all came to us and I
They had tears in their eyes and said, "We can't do what we do without Cloudflare." We didn't start the company to protect journalists. We started the company because we thought, "Let's do something that takes advantage of this opportunity in the market and hopefully will make some money and press our parents." Why most people start things. Here we were where these people couldn't be doing the important work they were doing without us. At that moment, it really just changed our focus where we realized that, "We're going to do this. This was bigger." I think the internet is bigger than any of us totally appreciate. As one of the real guardians of the internet, I think that's what drives everyone who works to Cloudflare. When you set up Cloudflare, you say it was about impressing your parents. I hope they were impressed by the way they would have been. What was the opportunity that you saw? The funny thing is that what my alternative was was my dad owned a bunch of restaurants and he was getting older and wanted to retire. He called me up and said, "Son, it's time for you to take over the family restaurants." Not only were they not very good restaurants, he owned, for example, the only hooters in Utah. I couldn't imagine anything worse than running my dad's hooters. It just wasn't my path. I'm afraid you can have to explain hooters to a British man. It's a place that sells chicken wings and has women that don't wear much money. Right. I think there's got to be a hooters in London. It's probably a thing about it. No, I'm just letting him back. Not again, what I wanted to do. But again, my dad had provided for a family and felt some obligation. Whether proud or not, I think he's still a little angry that I didn't take over the family business, but it all worked out. I think we were really said that, and again, this is a little bit wonky, but you could see that software was moving from something that you bought and got a physical copy of to moving to the cloud. The company's like Salesforce doing that. You could see that hardware, like the servers that you used to have to buy, those were moving to the cloud as well. What we just thought was inevitable was that the networking gear, the firewalls and all those things would also have to move to the cloud as well. The original idea of CloudFlaher was how do you take a firewall and put it in the cloud? You've evolved, because of your scale, you're now between 20 and 25% of the internet depends on your huge company. You've evolved, if I may say, into a phrase you used a moment ago, she's something that got into a particular vision of the internet. You made in that context, and in the context of what we're discussing about the development of AI. Quite remarkable decision, which is that you said AI bots will not be allowed to scrape the data from websites that are protected by CloudFlaher technology. Can you just explain precisely what was the decision you made and why did you make it? So it comes back to where we started with the conversations with media companies where they said our businesses are getting killed because people are taking our data. They're using it to give answers and their answer engines, but they're not sending us anything back. They're not paying us. They're not sending us traffic that we can monetize and one way or another. We started to think about what could happen. Again, we walked through and we said, "Done right, we could create a new market and a new business model, which might not only be better for media companies, but might be better for society as a whole, where we get away from the rage-baiting, dividing media that we have today back to rewarding real content creation." The question is, "How do you get there?" You need a market and the challenge is that no markets can exist without scarcity. There's not a market for error unless you're scuba diving, because there's no air underwater, so you have to pay someone to put air in a tank and then you breathe that air and they make money from the scarcity of air. If every media company is just giving their content away for free and they're letting anyone take it and they're not getting anything back, then there will never be a market. In order for us to get to that better media place, in order for us to understand it, we said we have to restrict this. The media companies, again, because they don't have the same technical sophistication often as someone like Cloudflare does, they didn't have the tools to be able to do that. We really do believe that, again, coming back to those journalists who are covering government corruption, coming back to the small local newspaper that we think that media is such a critical part of society and it deserves to be protected. We said, "We need to engage in this and we need to take all we've learned from stopping hackers around the world and apply that to help media companies have the ability to stop these AI bots, create scarcity, and then hopefully what emerges is not only in the world where all the journalists starve to death, not a world where all the media gets locked up behind five different AI companies, but one where there's a fair exchange of value, where if you're creating original content, you're paid for it. Again, I think the first step in doing that is you've got to actually restrict the crawlers. All such decisions, particularly one of such immense scale and consequence are trade-offs. They involve, frankly, pissing a lot of people off. When you were considering those trade-offs, what did you anticipate is the potential downsides you've had to deal with? I think there's a little bit of a misperception that we just blocked AI crawlers generally. What we actually did was I think a lot more thoughtful, which is we went and we looked at what pages behind us were either behind a subscription or had an advertisement on them. In those cases, that's an indication that the purpose of that page is to get a human to go to it, to either see the advertisement, make money off that, or pay for the subscription. In those cases, that should be blocked. On the other hand, the defaults really matter. What we said was we're going to default that if you're a media company making money through ads or subscriptions, we're going to default to block. You can override that. You can say, "No, no. I just want to contribute to artificial general intelligence." That's why I do podcasts or that's why I write the stories that I do. By default, we're going to block those things. Things that aren't advertised based, things that aren't subscriptions, we're going to leave that open. But again, you can say, "Listen, I don't like this AI stuff. We're going to shut my content off." That's a decision up to you. We're providing the tools and setting the defaults that we think makes sense to help build what is the future of an internet, which is more sustainable, is better than the internet the web. Content with the criticism I'll push back, though that might produce a better internet in some ways, at this current moment in history, it's a dangerous thing to put blocks on the innovation prompted by AI. Anything that places a limit on where AI can scrape away and provide data is, there's a liberal argument against it, which is that people, as you say, want these services and then want the best possible chatbot to give them the best possible information to organize the best possible holiday as a Gen.D.K.I. But also that there's an economic danger, potentially, even though you've made your decision for principled reasons, you say, there's an economic hazard in putting a blocker or an AI in some way. Well, there are lots of blockers on AI. If you want to get chips from Nvidia, Jensen makes you pay for them. Jensen Twang, the CEO and founder of Nvidia. If you want to get the best researchers, they get salaries. We're not going to say, oh, AI is so important that we're going to bring back slavery. That doesn't make any sense. I don't understand why if the content that's something like you is producing is the fuel that's running these things. Why is it they have to pay for the chips? They have to pay for the researchers, but they don't have to pay for the content. That doesn't make any sense to me. I think unless you're going to go to the extreme of saying, let's nationalize this and basically conscript everyone to work on it because it's that important, which is absurd. Of course, the people who are creating the content that fuels these answer engines should be getting compensated for. I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Matthew Prince, the boss of Cloudflare, the company that runs infrastructure for around about a quarter of the internet. Listen, if you are enjoying this podcast, please do subscribe on BBC Sounds. That way you won't miss future episodes. If you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. That way you'll get an alert when we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. Has the manosphere entered a new phase? Step inside the world of looks, maxing, mogging and a guy called Clavicular and discover how the rise of a weird internet language is shaping modern masculinity. This is the Global Story podcast from the BBC and we've been finding out why men's beauty standards are being shaped by far-right influences. Listen to the Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. I think a lot of people, especially those listening to this, will be
sympathetic to your argument and say this sounds like a principal decision and it is you know the sort of impulse to make sure creators get a fair shake seems one that a lot of people would say it's just common sense as well as the decent thing it is quite extraordinary isn't it that Matthew Prince is making these decisions I mean not because you're not in any way morally qualified but it's a huge responsibility for you to make and one of the criticisms of the broader internet which I think is more applied to people like the Jensen's Wangs or the Zuckerbergs or the Elon Musk's is that we have created this this world in which a few people with extraordinary wealth and power are making decisions that have enormous consequence for the whole globe and even when those decisions are ones that people might approve of as they might approve of what you're saying who are you guys to make the decisions yeah yeah I think the first of all we didn't make this decision on our own we met with BBC New York Times the Wall Street Journal all the you know every every possible journalist associated press and talk to them about what's the right thing to do here and again I only think of this as us sort of saying you know this is you you can't scrape the internet there's lots of the internet that's not behind Cloudflare but the reason so much of the internet is behind Cloudflare is because we're out there standing up for people like content creators we're actually saying this is a problem and if we don't do something about it that one of those bleak outcomes is pretty likely and so I think we have a duty to be making these these hard calls even when they are hard calls and this was frankly one of the easier calls that we made and you also have to abide by the law in all the different ways where you operate and I think that's something that I'm so looking online at the decisions that you had to make around whether or not neo-nazi websites such as the daily storm away which used your technology yeah and I think it's important to demarcate or distinguish between the kind of decisions you would make which I imagine working out for neo-nazi website can have your technology as you say you mostly provide it for people like transport for London yeah the neo-nazi is probably one in a thousand decisions or it's even it's less than that the funny thing about that is you know I never thought I'd know so much about neo-nazi's in my in my career and in a bunch of other things and for the most part our job around content moderation is pretty easy we don't really content moderates just I just want to do it in almost in your defense say when if Mark Zuckerberg we're here or if if Elon Musk we're here those guys are actually facilitating mass production of content and they're kind of making editorial decisions you know should this be allowed is that free speech is that inciting hatred you're not doing that and yet with the neo-nazi website which is you say it's a tiny fraction of the many decisions you've got to make on a daily basis but you did have something close to an editorial judgment to make about whether or not about who should speak yeah and I think that that's um we've basically done that three times in the company's history so it's sort of the mean time what's between these things what's every five years so we're probably do uh for for some controversy around this you know any any moment now um but what I think was different about what we did is it would have been very easy for us to fire the customer and then just if anyone called us about it say no comment or it was a violation of our terms of service or handed off to the lawyers um and and I actually think that's really dangerous that's what most technology companies do and I think it's part of why there's actually so little trust in technology companies because even if they're being very thoughtful and I think for the most part they are they're not transparent they're not transparent I think again we're not a government but we touch a billions of people's lives and so I think we have to think about how you build trust in a very similar way and so transparency has always been one of our core values um and so when we make decisions where it would be easier to just say no comment we say we get I get to talk about neo-Nazi and by the way you do podcasts and one of the big I mean Elon Musk's pretty available to speak but one of the other things about some of these companies that they have people that don't always talk openly about it in all in the context of all that we've discussed and your um your desire for a better internet and for creators to get paid well what have you made of the argument if you've been had a chance to follow it here in the UK around AI and copyright laws I don't know if you've seen there's a big old spat between creators and the government and the government is approaching this I think it's a trade off you know on the one hand you want to be seen to be pro innovation you want to allow to do its business and that's where some of the idea behind making technology firms exempt from copyright laws comes from on the other hand you've got this really influential creator saying you know what we need to come together to make sure almost like a union yeah that we get paid for our stuff yeah what you make of the debate that we've had where did you do take a view on it yeah and I'm a recovering intellectual property professor so so I you know there I I love a good copyright today but what I'll say is that typically and I'm actually not an expert on UK copyright laws but typically copyright laws protect fair use if you transform a work so if I read you know Williams if I read Hamlet and then I retell it sort of in a modern kind of you know London sort of times way like there's no copyright problem there I've taken something and I've actually transformed it which is kind of what the AI systems are doing they're taking information they're remixing it and they're giving it back to you in a way that's there and in that sense I worry that copyright is the wrong tool to be able to get creators what they absolutely deserve and if you look in the US where a number of these these cases have gone down the best case that's out there which was a case involving Anthropic the most well-reasoned case so far has actually said if you take information you consume it and then you recreate it that that's the same way that if I read a book and then write a story that was inspired by but isn't actually a direct copy of that that's allowed and so I worry that in if creators lean too heavily on copyright they might actually get a result which is not what they want that isn't to say the content creators shouldn't be compensated absolutely content creators should should be compensated and the good news is the AI companies like again we're 80% of the AI companies are cloud-flot customers so we know them really well as well and we've talked to them and what they have said over and over and over again is if there is a level playing field then we're happy to pay content creators but they're worried about one thing and this is actually I think the most interesting thing that's going on in the UK right now there's one company that all of the other AI companies worry about it's the reason why OpenAI was founded in the first place when Sam Altman and Neil and Moskut together and put together OpenAI what they were afraid of was Google that Google was so far ahead of everybody else in the content space that that they had this enormous advantage and today the thing that is the company that is holding content creators back from being compensated more than anyone else is Google and the reason why is that Google sort of struck the original deal with content creators you know 22 25 years ago where 27 years ago where they said we get a copy of your content in exchange for running a search engine where we'll send you traffic so Google feels like they have almost a god-given right to have a copy of everyone's traffic and they're gathering it up and they're using it for their AI systems that's giving them a really unfair advantage in the AI space and every other AI company is like listen we can't pay for content if Google is getting it for free and so I think actually the most interesting thing which is going on in the UK right now is that the competition authority is looking at Google and saying are they using their dominance in search in order to give themselves an unfair advantage in AI. But among other things I'd say we're still giving you unique visibility. Search is still dominant in the internet, the answer engine as opposed to the search engine is coming but if you're an artist particularly a small artist and you want some visibility type in your name the whole world can see it and that's an incredible value. Well I think that traditional search where you type in a search and you get back a treasure map that's one deal and that should have one set of rules and I think that that is a fair trade with content creators answer engines where you type something in and you just get an answer but you don't actually generate traffic that's different and Google is under an enormous amount of pressure and threat competitively from these new companies and so they're sort of trying to run the past while also migrating to the future and I think that what the UK may be in a unique position to do is to say it's fine you can do that but you've got to split those things apart. If you take content for search you can't use it for AI and if you take content for AI content creators have to be able to block that without blocking search and if the UK does that I think it actually might become the home to all content creators where they're going to say this is the place that is actually giving us protection giving us a fair shake creating that level playing field and I think if we can get Google to split crawling for search from crawling for AI that that will be the final step that we need to take in order to get every
I come and say, "Okay, now we're ready to start paying contact creators for the content they have." And this is a debate that is happening right now in the UK, and that's why I'm pure wearing this suit. Yes, fantastic to talk to you about it. So we've taken up a huge amount of time. I've got two quick, final questions. One is that we spoke to Daria Amade on this podcast a few weeks ago. And one of the things that he's achieved a bit of notoriety that he didn't really want to achieve for is around his, not for-cast or prediction, but his suggestion that AI was going to be a big, big, big threat to white collar jobs. The worry that lots of people, including white collar people who listen to this podcast, will have is that entry-level jobs, which require kind of systematic thought, in the next few years potentially, are going to get wiped out in finance, in managed-cased-on-se, law, and so on. And the artificial intelligence is coming for those jobs. Does that seem to you inevitable? Was it does to look for other people? I actually don't think it is. So as an example, we are heavy users of AI internally. Of course. And I've been before a lot of other people used machine learning. For sure. Yeah. And so one of the things, though, is how do we get people to really take advantage of it? And what we see is actually entry-level workers, our interns who come in, are often the best ambassadors to really bring in the latest of AI. 50-year-old CEOs are stuck in our ways. Whereas a brand new 21-year-old intern has actually a sort of new way of looking at the world. And there are going to be a massive productivity improvements that happen because of that. And for that reason, Cloudflare has massively expanded our internship program for this next coming year. I actually think that you're going to see different ways of working. But I kind of think that whether we're all going to lose our jobs to AI or whether we're living in a James Cameron film and it's a terminator, it's going to kill us all. I think those are distractions from the bigger point, which is this is a platform shift. And that platform, the same way that we went from your laptop and a browser to social, to mobile. Now we're going to go to AI. And that is going to fundamentally come after many business models that are out there. Those business models are going to change. Media is the canary in the coal mine. But what happens to brands? What happens to aggregators? What happens to small businesses that are out there? How is a small business if agents are shopping? Are you ever going to beat massive corporations that can optimize for that? I think those are the really interesting questions. And AI is going to come for the business models long before they come for our jobs and long before they actually come for turning us into the matrix or whatever. On which point, a final point, I know that we have lots of young listeners to this podcast. Many of whom would love nothing more than to be a tech entrepreneur. And you've been on this extraordinary story from studying English to begin with, to being a professor, to sort of a couple of missteps and all not missteps but honorable. Missteps. Missteps in the world of business. I mean, I was, I was a, I mean, crazy thing. 18 years ago I was a bartender. And so, so don't follow my path. That wasn't that's probably not the right thing to do. I don't know if you feel you should, sure, should not have gone to business school. But I just want to get in with yours of what you've learned. I've been growing a very successful company. Advice to young entrepreneurs. Listen to this, who want to win in this new world. You feel kind of both exhilarated and somewhat exhausted by all this chat about AI. But we're thinking about selling up their own company and being pretty radical with it. The big unlock for me was that the people who you want to have as your, as your teammates aren't necessarily the people who are your friends. There's a temptation to like go and start a company with like your mates who, you know, cheer for the same team and are about the same age and went to the same schools. But it turns out that if you're all the same, then you end up just fighting all the time over who's in charge. The org chart might say whatever, but you're all the same. So, you know, a role of the dice it could have been someone else's CEO and a different thing. What was really powerful about Klausler and I think this secret to our success is that the three of us who started it, we had a ton of respect for each other. But we were radically different. Michelle, one of my co-founders, you know, she is incredibly organized. She gets things done. She knows how to scale. Those are not my strengths. My strengths are, yeah, I can tell a good story. I can sort of think about what the future is going to look like. I'm always generating ideas. That's not her strength. And so we were different than, or she is just a, like, into this day. We're obviously friends because we've gone through this. But back in the day, like, we wanted to hung out together. And so then the big question is how do you find those people? Because it's not going to be the people that you necessarily went to school with. And so my advice would be go places that are growing like crazy and while you're there, don't look for the people who necessarily root for the same sports team as you do. But really internally recognize what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses. And find those other puzzle pieces around you that complement, fill in kind of the holes in your own personal cheese. And that can make you better. And again, that was the secret to CloudFlush success. Were the intentions for this year already looked up? No. The applications are just open applications the end of September. Matthew's fantastic speech. You thank you so much for coming in. Thank you so much for having me. Well, I hope that at the end of that conversation, you are persuaded, convinced that Matthew Prince is genuinely one of the most influential people in the modern digital arena. His decisions, his principles, his values have a huge sway over what many people see. But because he's a sensor, that's not what he's aiming to do at all. In fact, he think we've caused himself as a pretty liberal kind of guy. But because he has had to make decisions about who CloudFlare supports and also about whether or not CloudFlare will allow AI bots or these crawlers, as he was describing them, to scrape information from all of CloudFlare's clients, which just happens to be around about a quarter of the entire internet. And it's very timely what he's talking about. It's very timely, not just because we're living through this revolution, a revolution that we try very hard on this podcast to help you make sense of. But because on a week to week basis, regulators all around the world are looking at these companies and working out whether or not they agree with Matthew Prince. So last week, here in the UK, there's a very influential regulator here called the CMA, the competition and market authority. And last week, they designated Google with what's called strategic market status in general search. And this is a happy reminder of my days as the BBC's media editor. The strategic market status in general search, which includes AI overview and AI mode. And what that basically means is that the CMA, they've now got a designation around Google which allows them as the regulator, the CMA, to introduce targeted measures to address specific aspects of our Google operating search in the UK. In other words, to make really targeted direct interventions, saying what Google can and can't do. Google does dispute what Matthew Prince says and they do have a response, which they've pretty out there pretty publicly to the CMA's move. So on the CMA, Google says that many of the ideas for interventions that have been raised in the CMA's designation process would get in the way of UK innovation and growth. This is a very familiar argument. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but it's one that they've often said internet companies always say that if you make regulation too excessive and interfering, stops innovation, stops the freedom which allows new products to arise in the market. But the other thing, which they say specifically about Matthew Prince's claim is that they actually dispute the claim that he made about traffic to websites falling since the launch of AI overview and AI mode. In fact, Google says that and I quote the total organic click volume from Google search, two websites has been relatively stable year over year. So you remember the Matthew Prince said actually for lots of the companies that were coming to him, they found that traffic had fallen very dramatically. Google says it's pretty much stable year to year. There was a lot in what Matthew Prince said and I'm just really grateful for it because he's obviously a tremendously smart bloke former law professor as well as one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, frankly. There was a lot of what he said which was really quite optimistic. So that little story at the end, that little ditty about people getting paid a lot of money by Spotify to answer search queries and come up with their own music. That was a kind of cheering thought. The also the idea that in AI we're not just going to get a generic mash or slop of AI content but actually there is going to be this flight to quality and uniqueness and niche interests. That was pretty cheering and I was struck that in a way what's happening now is this podcast grows and reaches more and more of you and it's very exciting that we're doing that is we're in a way getting a kind of conversation going on between episodes. So Daria Amade, undoubtedly one of the most influential men in modern AI, the CEO and co-founder of Anthropic, he was pretty clear that the impact AI could have on entry level white collar jobs would be potentially catastrophic up to half of entry level white collar jobs graduate level if you like. White collar jobs being wiped out maybe three to five years potentially not a forecast for prediction, just a possibility he wanted to alert us to Matthew Prince went in a different direction. His concern isn't so much about the impact on jobs but more just the complete transformation of business models. The thing is that will kill some old business models but it will also create some new ones and I guess the big challenge for those of us who want entrepreneurs who over 15 years have built a multi billion dollar revenue companies is
how do you make sure that in this new world of new business models, you're part of a business or an institution that can still thrive? (upbeat music) - Okay, a couple of several, in fact, heartfelt thanks. First of all, and this is a reflection on last week. Huge thanks to Jacob Dunn. He is an extraordinary person, a very impressive person. He's also someone who's killed someone. This is a quite bonkers contradiction or paradox or other, it's not a contradiction, it's a paradox which I've been kind of thinking a lot about over the past week and you guys have as well. I can say hand on heart that on social media, particularly Instagram, on email in the street, random people bumping into me after, I take my daughters to gymnastics on a Sunday morning. Hello to those of you who have kind enough to say hello last Sunday, I have had just the most extraordinary response to that episode last week with Jacob Dunn. And it's wonderful, okay? I know it was a lot to ask of you guys to get through an hour and 45 minutes. So many of you did, and that's because the story is just incredible. And the heart of it is a radical idea, restorative justice, which I know many of you are interested. Some of you are going to go off and see a punch, the play in Central London, maybe even in Broadway, for our American listeners off the back of it. And it makes me think that this is an idea, especially all the issues around criminal justice and prisons in particular, that we must, must come back to. But thank you as well to Jacob who spoke very openly about some very difficult issues to put it mildly last week. I'll just give you a little flavour of a couple of the messages that have come in. I've been so many, but I just want to give you a sense of two, really. Jill says, thank you for this, Jill. Why should we, supposedly, civilise country, not do all we can to help offenders see that there is another way to be harder to dispute that, Jill? Thank you very much. Here's a message from Mel. I found listening to Jacob was so very interesting, especially hearing how he overcame his start in life and used his experiences to become such an inspirational young man. I have to say to you that there were moments in that podcast that moved me to tears. I can only imagine that you probably felt the same way whilst interviewing him. At the end of the podcast, I felt such a huge mixture of emotions. In a way, I felt as though I shouldn't like him. But by the end, I couldn't help feeling that he's such an extraordinary young man and many teenagers and young people would benefit from hearing his story. As a parent, it highlighted to me the power of forgiveness, especially towards someone that's hurt you beyond measure. Thank you so much to everyone who listened back. If you haven't heard that episode, just look it up in the radical feed. Thank you so much to everyone who got in touch. Please do keep them coming. If you've got a radical idea, if you've got a suggestion for a guest, just a response to what you've heard or a question. You can watch us 03301239480 or you can email us on
[email protected]. [MUSIC PLAYING] Now, before I go, let me tell you that on political thinking, this week, Nick is sitting down with the UN's A Chief Tom Fletcher. He has been in the job for a year. You've often heard him on the today program. I've interviewed him there many times in extraordinarily influential bloke. He's now the man responsible for getting food and tents and health care into the Gaza Strip. But he's also going to pull back the curtain on his life behind the scenes of British politics. He was a very influential advisor at the top of the UK government, advising Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and the coalition government as led by David Cameron. You can listen on BBC Sounds from Friday morning, which is also where you can listen and subscribe to radical with the Mulrugging. I've got to say that is an episode of people thinking that I'm particularly looking forward to. So do check out Nick's podcast there. And by the way, you can also watch episodes of Radical with a Mulrugging on the I-Player. Speak to you next week. Thank you for listening and goodbye. Step inside the world of looks, maxing, mogging, and a guy called Clavicular, and discover how the rise of a weird internet language is shaping modern masculinity. This is the Global Story podcast from the BBC, and we've been finding out why men's beauty standards are being shaped by far-right influences. Listen to the Global Story on BBC.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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