Source: The Verge
Matthew Prince is floating a radical restructuring of internet economics—reviving HTTP 402 (Payment Required) to make bot operators pay for the infrastructure they consume rather than socializing those costs across human users. If bot traffic truly reaches 1000x human levels as Cloudflare's data suggests, the current model where search engines and AI scrapers effectively steal bandwidth becomes unsustainable. The alternative is paywalls for bots or selective blocking, including Google. Edge computing platforms could shift from service providers to toll collectors, forcing AI trainers and search indexers to bear infrastructure costs now absorbed by human users.