Do you register with Google, Amazon or Microsoft to use the web?
Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch sounds like safety but it’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They’ve built an allowlist for the open web and told builders to apply for permission. That’s not how the internet works. An application form is not a standard.
Yes, identity for agents is a real problem. But Cloudflare is solving it like a border checkpoint. Get on their list or get treated like a trespasser. That’s vendor approval not an internet protocol. An allowlist run by ONE company?
Authentication for that world isn’t “ask Cloudflare for a hall pass.” It’s verifiable chains of delegation and request-level proof: open, portable, and independent of any one company.
The Web Must Remain Open
The web thrived because no one owned it.
In the 90s, Microsoft tried to “embrace and extend” the web, but failed. And that failure was a blessing. Because no single company controlled it, anyone could publish, anyone could innovate, and protocols carried more weight than corporate policies.
We’ve seen this movie before. Open standards beat closed plug-ins. HTML5 and the Open Web Platform displaced proprietary runtimes like Flash (Adobe) and Silverlight (Microsoft). Flash was formally ended in 2020 and Silverlight in 2021, while HTML5 became a W3C Recommendation back in 2014.
The pattern is consistent: when the commons defines the interface, innovation compounds; when a vendor hands out permission slips, it stalls.
Agents Are Inevitable
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