The threat of potential litigation
In making this look a bit like a terms of service agreement, Cloudflare’s goal is explicitly to put legal pressure on Google to change its policy of bundling traditional search crawlers and AI Overviews.
“Make no mistake, the legal team at Google is looking at this saying, ‘Huh, that’s now something that we have to actively choose to ignore across a significant portion of the web,’” Prince told me.
He further characterized this as an effort to get a company that he says has historically been “largely a good actor” and a “patron of the web” to go back to doing the right thing.
“Inside of Google, there is a fight where there are people who are saying we should change how we’re doing this,” he explained. “And there are other people saying, no, that gives up our inherent advantage, we have a God-given right to all the content on the Internet.”
Amid that debate, lawyers have sway at Google, so Cloudflare tried to design tools “that made it very clear that if they were going to follow any of these sites, there was a clear license which was in place for them. And that will create risk for them if they don’t follow it,” Prince said.
The next web paradigm
It takes a company with Cloudflare’s scale to do something like this with any hope that it will have an impact. If just a few websites made this change, Google would have an easier time ignoring it, or worse yet, it could simply stop crawling them to avoid the problem. Since Cloudflare is entangled with millions of websites, Google couldn’t do that without materially impacting the quality of the search experience.
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