Cloud Splitter

CLOUDFLARE CEO MATTHEW PRINCE HAS A PLAN TO SAVE THE INTERNET. IT STARTS WITH CLOSING OFF THE SPIGOT OF CONTENT TO AI COMPANIES.

- BY Brendan Vaughan

Cloudflare has often been described as some version of "the most important internet company you've never heard of."

But for the better part of 2025, cofounder and CEO Matthew Prince has been trying to change that.

THE COMPANY'S CORE BUSINESS is to improve the performance and enhance the security of websites and online applications, protecting against malicious actors and routing web traffic through its data centers to optimize performance. “Six billion people pass through our network every single month,” Prince says. If Cloudflare is doing its job well, no one notices.*

But in July, Prince declared “Content Independence Day,” a broadside against the AI companies that, in his view, were unfairly scraping content to the detriment of the media industry. Cloudflare enabled clients that signed up for its “pay per crawl” service to block AI crawlers from accessing their content unless the companies—Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI, etc.—paid for the privilege. This was catnip to the media, Fast Company included, which immediately started paying a lot more attention to Cloudflare. “I think this is the most interesting question over the next five years,” Prince says. “What is the future business model of the internet going to be?”

Prince has a personal interest in this question. He was the editor of his college newspaper at Trinity College (the Connecticut one, not Dublin) and, in 2023, he and his wife purchased the Park Record, his hometown newspaper in Park City, Utah. “I appreciate the hard work of our journalistic team, who’s showing up at city council meetings, covering local politics. There has to be a business model to support that work,” he says. “That work is critically important if we're going to have a functioning society.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.