With regard to proof of work systems that provide revenue:
1) Making LLM (and other) scrapers pay for the resources they use seems perfectly fine to me. Also, as someone that manages some level of scraping (on the order of low tens of millions of requests a month), I'm fine with this. There's a wide range of scraping that the problem is not some resource cost, but the other side not wanting to deal with setting up APIs or putting so many hurdles on access that it's easier to just bypass it.
2) This seems like it might be an opportunity for Cloudflare. Let customers opt-in to requiring a proof of work when visitors already trip the cloudflare vetting page that runs additional checks to see if you're a bad actor, and apply any revenue to a service credit towards their monthly fee (or if on a free plan, as credit to be used for trying out additional for-pay features). There might be a perverse inventive to toggle on more stringent checking from cloudflare, but ultimately since it's all being paid for that's the site owner's choice on how they want to manage their site.
1) Making LLM (and other) scrapers pay for the resources they use seems perfectly fine to me. Also, as someone that manages some level of scraping (on the order of low tens of millions of requests a month), I'm fine with this. There's a wide range of scraping that the problem is not some resource cost, but the other side not wanting to deal with setting up APIs or putting so many hurdles on access that it's easier to just bypass it.
2) This seems like it might be an opportunity for Cloudflare. Let customers opt-in to requiring a proof of work when visitors already trip the cloudflare vetting page that runs additional checks to see if you're a bad actor, and apply any revenue to a service credit towards their monthly fee (or if on a free plan, as credit to be used for trying out additional for-pay features). There might be a perverse inventive to toggle on more stringent checking from cloudflare, but ultimately since it's all being paid for that's the site owner's choice on how they want to manage their site.