Age-Gating the Internet + Cloudflare Takes On A.I. Scrapers + HatGPT

What It Covers

UK's Online Safety Act mandates age verification across websites including social media and adult content, requiring users to prove identity with driver's licenses or facial recognition, sparking privacy concerns and workarounds.

Key Questions Answered

• •Age Verification Impact: Traffic to content creators has declined 10x over ten years due to Google's AI overviews keeping users on search pages. OpenAI makes it 750 times harder and Anthropic 30,000 times harder for creators to get traffic compared to traditional search.
• •Cloudflare's AI Blocking: Cloudflare now blocks AI scrapers by default for websites, requiring AI companies to pay content creators for access. The system tracks bad actors using residential proxies and can feed garbage data to poorly behaving crawlers as enforcement.
• •Privacy Risks: Age verification systems require uploading driver's licenses and selfies to websites, creating security vulnerabilities. The Tea app breach exposed user verification photos to hackers who created abusive websites, demonstrating predictable risks of decentralized identity verification across multiple platforms.
• •Revenue Share Model: Content licensing deals should follow a Spotify-style model where AI companies pay 20-30% of revenue to content creators. Small publishers need standardized marketplace pricing rather than individual negotiations, with Cloudflare facilitating transactions for sites unable to negotiate directly.
• •Device-Based Solution: Apple's upcoming age assurance API allows parents to set children's ages on devices, passing anonymous tokens to apps instead of requiring repeated identity uploads. This approach preserves privacy while enabling age-appropriate content filtering across platforms without storing personal documents.