Comment by hedora

If they only charge agents a fee, then people will just set up a mcp endpoint or whatever to desktop chrome/firefox.

As it is, their captchas are already blocking tons of human traffic.

The idea that the price will be low unless you access it a lot falls over due to caching. Big tech companies will cache whatever they scrape, paying for one copy. Regular people and smaller companies will not read the same thing enough to amortize the cost of the first fetch, so they’ll pay 1000’s to 1,000,000’s of times more than the monopolies per-use of a given piece of information.

If individuals set up a federated cache with open access, they’ll get sued for copyright infringement. (Even though that would solve the supposed problem: That cloudflare cannot afford to operate a cache).

The end result is that only closed agents will be allowed to (legally) read most content without paying extortion-level fees.

Also, like with YouTube and video, serving text will become a winner-takes-all proposition.