9 min read
Cloudflare launched 15 years ago this week. We like to celebrate our birthday by announcing new products and features that give back to the Internet, which we’ll do a lot of this week. But, on this occasion, we've also been thinking about what's changed on the Internet over the last 15 years and what has not.
With some things there's been clear progress: when we launched in 2010 less than 10 percent of the Internet was encrypted, today well over 95 percent is encrypted. We're proud of the role we played in making that happen .
Some other areas have seen limited progress: IPv6 adoption has grown steadily but painfully slowly over the last 15 years, in spite of our efforts . That's a problem because as IPv4 addresses have become scarce and expensive it’s held back new entrants and driven up the costs of things like networking and cloud computing.
The Internet’s Business Model
Still other things have remained remarkably consistent: the basic business model of the Internet has for the last 15 years been the same — create compelling content, find a way to be discovered, and then generate value from the resulting traffic. Whether that was through ads or subscriptions or selling things or just the ego of knowing that someone is consuming what you created, traffic generation has been the engine that powered the Internet we know today.
Make no mistake, the Internet has never been free. There's always been a reward system that transferred value from consumers to creators and, in doing so, filled the Internet with content. Had the Internet not had that reward system it wouldn't be nearly as vibrant as it is today.
A bit of a trivia aside: why did Cloudflare never build an ad blocker despite many requests ? Because, as imperfect as they are, ads have been the only micropayment system that has worked at scale to encourage an open Internet while also compensating content creators for their work. Our mission is to help build a better Internet, and a core value is that we’re principled, so we weren’t going to hamper the Internet’s fundamental business model.
Traffic ≠ Value
But that same traffic-based reward system has also created many of the problems we lament about the current state of the Internet. Traffic has always been an imperfect proxy for value. Over the last 15 years we've watched more of the Internet driven by annoying clickbait or dangerous ragebait. Entire media organizations have built their businesses with a stated objective of writing headlines to generate the maximum cortisol response because that's what generates the maximum amount of traffic.
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