After earlier this year launching a marketplace that allows websites to charge AI bots for scraping their content, web infrastructure provider Cloudflare is pushing for increased regulation in the AI sector. The company’s chief executive Matthew Prince says he’s in London to speak with the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), where he’s proposing stricter rules on how Google should be able to compete in the AI race, given its search dominance. The CMA earlier this month designated Google with a special status in the search and advertising markets because of its “substantial and entrenched” position. The move will allow the regulator to impose more stringent regulations beyond just search and ads, including in areas like Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, the Discover feed, Top Stories, and News tab. According to Prince, Cloudflare is in a good position to make recommendations because it’s not in the AI business itself, but has a large number of relationships with the AI companies themselves. “We don’t have a dog directly in the fight. We’re not an AI company,” Prince said, speaking at the Bloomberg Tech conference in London this week. “We’re not a media publisher, but we’re this network that sits between them. 80% of the AI companies are our customers,” he added. The Cloudflare boss believes that Google should have to compete on the same footing as other AI companies, which is not what it’s doing today, he said. Rather, Google uses its existing web crawler to crawl content for its AI products and services, in addition to its search engine. This, Prince said, gives Google an unfair advantage. “Google is saying, ‘we have an absolute God-given right to all of the content in the world, even if we don’t pay for it, because look what we did for the last 27 years,” Prince explained. “And, they’re saying we can take it and use the same crawler we use for search in order to power our AI systems. And if you want to opt out of one, you have to opt out of both,” he n...
First seen: 2025-10-21 20:12
Last seen: 2025-10-22 14:23