Details don’t matter – pick your own headline. I doubt we have heard the last of this, but this, too, shall pass:

With Cloudflare’s new setting, websites can block – by default – online bots that scrape their data

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/01/technology/cloudflare-ai-data.html

---

2022: cloudflare blocks kiwifarms, but in 2025 it still exists:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/04/cloudflare-reverses-decision-and-drops-trans-trolling-website-kiwi-farms

Quote:

In a blog post [in September 2022], which didn’t mention Kiwi Farms or the pressure campaign, Cloudflare’s chief executive, Matthew Prince, and its vice-president of public policy, Alissa Starzak, suggested the company regretted taking action against the far-right websites 8chan and Daily Stormer in 2019 and 2017, saying there was a “deeply troubling” response afterwards from authoritarian regimes calling for the company to block human rights websites.

2017: cloudflare blocks daily stormer, but in 2025 it still exists:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

2016: cloudflare blocks users of the tor project:

https://blog.torproject.org/trouble-cloudflare/

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-trouble-with-tor/

2018: cloudflare introduces tor project onion services:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-onion-service/

Personal Perspective

Cloudflare’s position is expeditious. Don’t read too much into what either the long term impact will be, nor what the moral impact will pan out as.