The internet is breaking. So what’s next? with Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**Matthew Prince** (1:35)
Google is the hero of the last 30 years of the Internet. They financed the entire thing. The problem is that AI breaks that. Eighteen months ago, it was 20 times harder to get traffic from Google than it was 10 years ago. Now, it's 50 times harder.
It's 3,500 times harder to get traffic from OpenAI than to Google of old. 65,000 times harder to get traffic from Anthropic. Why did Sam and Elon start OpenAI? Because they were terrified that Google was going to run away with the whole game. Everything is started effectively as a counterweight to Google, and that's the puzzle.

**Bob Safian** (2:18)
That's Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince speaking to me live on stage at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas in mid-March. Cloudflare helps facilitate more than 20% of all online traffic, which gives Matthew unique perspective about how AI is changing the internet and the motivations of the major tech platforms. He also shares his real-time experience on the front lines of cyber war with Iran. This is Matthew's second appearance on the show and he doesn't disappoint. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian and this is Rapid Response.
So, please join me in welcoming Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:10)
Yes.

**Matthew Prince** (3:14)
These look very official.

**Bob Safian** (3:16)
Very official. This is a very official gathering. We're very official folks. You were on my show six months ago. And since that time, so much has changed. You talked about how the number of new websites has grown dramatically.

**Matthew Prince** (3:32)
After plateauing for a really long time, actually declining for a little bit, we're now seeing the fastest creation of new websites that has happened in the entire history of the web.

**Bob Safian** (3:41)
We have the amount of bot traffic has gone from about 20 percent of all traffic to trending to 50 percent by 2027 and growing.

**Matthew Prince** (3:51)
We think it'll be over half of internet traffic is generated by bots.

**Bob Safian** (3:56)
The business model of the future is unclear. You gave this example about how even Walmart, Amazon, and Target have wildly different business models, wildly different approaches.

**Matthew Prince** (4:08)
Walmart has said, agents are welcome, come on, come all. Amazon is literally suing companies and it was just successful in a motion against perplexity saying, you are not, if you're an agent allowed to shop on amazon.com, two of the smartest retailers in the world have wildly divergent strategies. That's so rare that that happens. I think it just shows how uncertain everyone is about what the future is going to look like.

**Bob Safian** (4:34)
To add to all of this, we now have a conflict in the Middle East.

**Matthew Prince** (4:39)
Yeah.

**Bob Safian** (4:40)
Really? Yeah. I wanted to ask you about this because I remember when you talked to me, you said, and I'm going to quote this, Cloudflare goes to war every day with Iranian hackers, Russian hackers, and North Koreans. Now, what is the status of that now with the conflict going on?

**Matthew Prince** (5:00)
Yeah. It was interesting.
Sometimes we see things and we can't explain them. But on February 27th, the attacks coming out of Iran, so from Iran targeting the West, increased 7X off baseline. So there's always background. Then on February 27th, massive spike. Why? We're not sure. Did they get advance warning that on the 28th, the US was going to start bombing? Was it just coincidence? What was going on? We're not sure. But we did see that massive spike, usually in kinetic conflict. So what we saw, Russia, Ukraine, we saw Israel, Hamas, cyber proceeds and then stays elevated through the entire time of when there's a physical war going on, and then often lasts slightly after whenever peace is declared. In this case, it was different. So we saw a massive spike on the 27th, and on the 28th, it dropped down to less than 10 percent of baseline.