Cloudflare’s 2025 Annual Founders’ Letter

Many folks haven't heard of Cloudflare but they run a huge amount of Internet infrastructure. I tend to find their product announcements very opinionated towards an overall direction they feel the Internet is or should be going. There annual letter strikes a ton of change.

Today the conditions to bring about that change may be happening. In the last year, something core to the Internet we've all known has changed. It's being driven by AI and it has an opportunity with some care and nurturing to help bring about what we think may be a much better Internet.

AI as a wave that will cause a lot of problems, particularly for ad supported media, but open the door for real value to be recognized and built upon.

Imagine a future business model of the Internet that doesn't reward traffic-generating ragebait but instead rewards those content creators that help fill in the holes in our collective metaphorical cheese. That will involve some portion of the subscription fees AI companies collect, and some portion of the revenue from the ads they'll inevitably serve, going back to content creators who most enrich the collective knowledge.

I would place under this the lack of micropayment infrastructure and ability which forced everything to attention models as the problem. Freeing ourselves of that surveillance economy would be incredible.