Comment by rralian

My gut reactions…

- I agree that something like this is necessary or the whole model of the internet will be broken, like Matthew Prince [explained in this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H5C9EL3C82Y).

- Their approach seems very imperfect, but I understand that you have to start somewhere.

- They are paying per crawl… but in fairness it should really be per usage. It’s like paying music artists once when they upload to Spotify rather than per-play -- even though one artist gets zero plays and another gets ten million. Sure, the idea is crawlers will bid more for the popular content author, but what if a nobody author has a one-hit-wonder piece of content. They’ll still just get a couple bips per crawl and then the cat is out of the bag.

- One solution to this would be requiring a GDPR-style forget mechanism, where the author is granting a limited-duration license for the content (say… one week), after which it must be deleted and re-licensed. This would be a huge fix for the whole thing… and the more I think about it the more I think it’s essential for this to work.

- The auction mechanics are biased to the crawler… if there is a spread between artist price and crawler max price, then the crawler pays the lower price set by the artist. It should be the average.

- They will need to provide content authors with analytics about the pricing mechanics for the bids the crawlers are making.

- If this whole thing works, then products that optimize bid mechanics on behalf of authors will be a big growth industry.

- If Cloudflare are setting themselves up as the clearing mechanism for payments, that’s far too much power and profit for one company. It’s even worse than the Google monopoly. Somehow the payment mechanics need to be democratized.