Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince on why Google must ‘play by the same rules’ as other AI companies

In response to the CMA’s move, Google has stated that heavy-handed measures could slow AI-era product launches, raise business costs, and undermine a service it claims added £118 billion ($157 billion) to the U.K. economy in 2023.

Prince, ever the middleman, between publishers (and other content owners) that rely on Cloudflare’s network for security, performance, and access control, and AI companies, which depend on it to deliver requests, crawl content, and serve models efficiently. That puts Cloudflare at the chokepoint where access rules, provenance, and traffic flows get enforced. If a publisher wants to block or throttle AI crawlers, or if an AI company needs to prove it’s respecting provenance standards, Cloudflare is the infrastructure layer that can make that happen.

Cloudflare “doesn’t have a dog in the fight,” as Prince put it, meaning he can come at the issue from a place of neutrality.  

In a year when AI crawlers are reshaping distribution, Prince has become publishers’ most practical ally — the infrastructure chief who can actually enforce paywalls, provenance and rate-limits at scale. 

After meeting with the CMA in London, Prince flew to Lisbon, Portugal — Cloudflare’s European HQ, where Digiday spoke with him over video.

Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and flow. 

You’ve done a lot with publishers this year. How big a focus is your work with regulators like the CMA, especially on separating Google Search from AI crawlers, compared with your other priorities?

When we talk to all the AI companies, they all say they’re willing to pay for content, and we think that’s fair. Except one. The one notable exception is Google. 

And Google says, “Listen, we’ve been the patron of the internet for the last 27 years. We’ve done more to support the ecosystem than anyone else, and we’ve always been able to get content for free for search. As we transition to being an AI company, why shouldn’t we still be able to get content?”

But the deal is different, and that’s the challenge. 

We now have this kind of standoff where everybody else in the AI ecosystem is saying, “we’re willing to pay for content, but it needs to be fair.” It can’t be, “we pay and Google gets it for free,” right? And Google is saying, “No, we’re never going to pay because — look at all this stuff we did for the last 27 years. Look how valuable it was. We care about the ecosystem.”

Right, so one rule for them and another for everyone else.

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The challenge is that media companies are blocking all of the AI companies except Google. Because they have to just survive. And they have to continue to let Google crawl, because Google forces you, if you want to be in search and you want to run their ads, you have to allow their crawler, but their crawler also powers their AI products, and they don’t let you split those things apart.

We know how important this is for publishers. What happens in the wider market if no action is taken to split the crawlers?

With no action, you’re going to slow down AI innovation by all of the other AI companies. You’re going to hand Google a unique advantage that nobody else has, and you’re going to kill new potential startups from getting involved. The status quo is the one where we have this sort of broken system, where the company that had the lion’s share of the market yesterday is able to leverage that in a way that may give them the lion’s share of the market tomorrow. 

And Google may win on the merits, but they should win on the merits — they shouldn’t win because they have a structural advantage that nobody else can copy. So, just on a pure fairness perspective, it seems right that as a new market emerges, the king of yesterday shouldn’t automatically be able to win in the new market of tomorrow.

How confident are you that Google will change tack on this? 

I’m hopeful that Google will just recognize that the deal has changed, and they should pay for content, for their AI products, because they don’t send traffic. Even if they don’t for their search products, it’s fine, just split those things apart. But if they’re not willing to do it, I think some sort of regulatory action makes a lot of sense. And the U.K. is not alone in thinking about this — we’re talking to regulators around the world, so I think it’s inevitable that that’s going to happen. 

How did it go with the CMA?

I was struck by the rigor and carefulness and thoughtfulness of the people that I got to meet with at the CMA, in how they’re thinking about this. I think that this topic can be very emotional at times. And I was struck by how this regulator, more so than some others that we’ve interacted with in other parts of the world, was very focused on the facts, focused on what could happen in order to make the most robust market in the long term. They are being careful and precise and wanting to be extremely limited — because you could do all kinds of things — but [they’re focused on] this one small change, which is super modest: Google has to play by the same rules for their AI products that everyone else has to, in the AI space.  

Google is racing AI rivals, which also puts it in a tricky position, so will regulation be the final defense for publishers?

The DNA of Google goes back to caring about what’s right for the internet. And there are a lot of people there who are still very much driven by that. And no company has done more good for the internet than Google. But they’re in a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, and in part, it’s because of regulatory pressure that they’re under. It’s very hard for them to do something voluntarily right now, because they’re waiting for regulators to act. And yet the regulators would love Google to step up and do the right thing. So we’re kind of in a tricky spot. 

So unfortunately, the incentives are going to be hard for Google to act and tell a lot of this regulatory scrutiny works its way through the system, but I am hopeful that they will come to the conclusion that this is the right thing for the ecosystem. I’m hopeful they do it for the right reason. But even if they don’t, I’m confident that there will be plenty of levers that we can pull to force them.