Post Syndicated from Matthew Prince original https://blog.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-2024-annual-founders-letter

This week Cloudflare will celebrate the fourteenth anniversary of our launch. We think of it as our birthday. As is our tradition ever since our first anniversary, we use our Birthday Week each year to launch new products that we think of as gifts back to the Internet. For the last five years, we also take this time to write our annual Founders’ Letter reflecting on our business and the state of the Internet. This year is no different.

That said, one thing that is different is you may have noticed we’ve actually had fewer public innovation weeks over the last year than usual. That’s been because a couple of incidents nearly a year ago caused us to focus on improving our internal systems over releasing new features. We’re incredibly proud of our team’s focus to make security, resilience, and reliability the top priorities for the last year. Today, Cloudflare’s underlying platform, and the products that run on top of it, are significantly more robust than ever before.

With that work largely complete, and our platform in its strongest shape ever, we plan to pick back up the usual cadence of new product launches that we’re known for. This Birthday Week, you’ll see many as we roll out performance improvements only our Connectivity Cloud can deliver to accelerate all our customers’ websites by a mind-blowing 45 percent (automatically and for free), launch new features to make our developer platform faster and easier to use, plug the web’s last encryption hole, accelerate AI inference globally, provide new levels of support for startups and the open source community, and much much more.

This is easily our favorite week of the year because of how it allows our team to give back to the Internet and live up to our mission.

Challenges for the Internet ahead

The robustness of Cloudflare’s platform today contrasts with what feels like an Internet that has become far more fragile over the previous year. When we first articulated our mission as helping build a better Internet, we assumed that “better” meant one that was faster, more reliable, more secure, more private, and more efficient. But today it seems like something more fundamental.

The last year has been characterized by a normalization of Internet shutdowns and limits on Internet access around the world. What were once tactics reserved for authoritarian regimes have spread to even Western democratic nations, where courts and legislatures have been emboldened to restrict fundamental protocols to control perceived harms.

We’ve seen a dramatic uptick in courts of limited jurisdiction ordering sites they found objectionable blocked globally at the DNS level, nations turning off the Internet for most their citizens in the name of preventing cheating on standardized tests (while it remains on in wealthy and politically connected neighborhoods), ISPs proposing legislation to impose new taxes on content creators, and whole services being banned in countries that had previously declared that more Internet was always better than less. 

This is, unfortunately, a dark time in the history of the Internet.

AI’s Threat to Original Content Creation

At the same time, the business model of the web is eroding. The quid pro quo of the web’s last era — the search era — was that you let a company like Google scrape data from your website in exchange for them sending you traffic. In that model, content creators could then generate value from that traffic through ads, selling products, or just getting the ego boost of knowing that someone cares enough about the thing you created to take the time to view it.

That same quid pro quo does not hold up in the era we’re moving into — the AI era — where answers are delivered to questions without ever having to visit the authoritative source. And, if content creators can no longer generate value from their creations, it’s inevitable they’ll generate less content and we’ll all, including the AI companies that need original content to train their models, lose out as a result.

Picking Up the Mantle

The Internet remains a miracle, but it no longer feels inevitable. It is under attack from active adversaries and beginning to rot from benign neglect. And, with the largest tech companies distracted by their own regulatory challenges, it finds itself without a clear champion. We’re proud of our team for picking up that mantle. At Cloudflare, we believe in the Internet and we will fight for it.

That’s why we invest in our public policy team to educate lawmakers and jurists on how best to control the harms created by some limited corners of the Internet without destabilizing its underlying protocols. Why we believe it’s important to provide so many of our services for free. And it’s why this Birthday Week we’ll announce new ways for the AI systems that hunger for original content to compensate content creators in a way that is equitable. Without a new paradigm, we worry that the incentives that allowed the Internet to flourish will shrivel and its miracle will fade.

Missions matter. Ours it to help build a better Internet. We, or one of our senior executives, still talk to every candidate we hire before extending an offer because we want to ensure we communicate the importance of our mission. One of the most common questions we’re asked is how we plan to preserve Cloudflare’s culture? Our answer is always the same: the goal isn’t how to preserve our culture, it’s always how to improve it. The same has to be true for the Internet. We can’t just try to preserve the past, we need to imagine new ways to improve it.

That requires champions to stand up and imagine a better Internet. It’s been too long since you’ve read a positive story about the Internet even though it continues to be a miracle. We are proud that we have the team, platform, and mantle to not just preserve, but improve on, that miracle. It is our mission and what motivates everything we do at Cloudflare. And nowhere is that more on display than during the week ahead. If you too are inspired by our mission, we encourage you to apply to join our team.

Stay tuned for an incredible Birthday Week of new products that make progress on our mission. Thank you to our team around the world for everything you do. Cloudflare is stronger because of the work we’ve accomplished, and the Internet will be stronger because of Cloudflare.