00:00 Speaker B
How will the Internet be defined in the next 10 years?
00:01 Speaker A
You know, I think the Internet has had platform migration before. Well, we’ve moved from browsers to social to mobile. AI is a platform shift. The way consumers consume information is through an AI interface. And that’s how they consume information today, that’s how they do commerce going forward, and the adoption rate is amazing. In just three and a half years, a third of the world’s population is already using generative AI tools. Well, that’s double the penetration rate of mobile, which used to be the fastest growing technology out there. And as these things become places where we consume information, what that means is that if you’re a platform, whether it’s Yahoo Finance, or, or, the New York Times, or whatever, the eyes that come back to you will decrease. So the old internet business models of showing ads and selling subscriptions won’t work in this new world where information is consumed by the AI platform itself. Well, agents don’t click on ads. To do that, we need to find other ways to ensure that content creators like you and others continue to get paid for the important content they’re creating.
01:21 Speaker B
What are the ways? What are the ways to survive?
01:25 Speaker A
Well, I don’t know if III knows the exact answer, but I feel like it’s due to a few things. First, for the first time in history, two months ago, online automated, bot, and agent traffic overtook human traffic. And if we continue to accelerate at the rate we’re seeing, in five years, automated online traffic will be 1,000 times more human online traffic. In other words, humans are subject to rounding errors on the Internet. What this means is that there will be a ton of additional infrastructure needed to build and support it. And someone has to pay the price. So I think there’s some version of this that the internet has been consuming since the beginning, where if an agent is visiting a page, there’s going to be some sort of micropayment. But just to give you some insight, CloudFlare, we process about 500 million internet requests per second all day long. We believe that 1-10% of this is appropriate for some type of microtransaction. So in order to scale from day one to 100 million transactions per second in a very reasonable amount of time, you have to build a small financial system that can do very small transactions on day one, 10 million transactions per second. For reference, Visa, the world’s largest payment network, processes approximately 18,000 transactions per second. So there’s a lot of really great technology that we have to build to support this future. But I think it’s about micropayments, having a marketplace of content and making sure that you can choose who has access to that content. And perhaps advertising platforms will be geared toward agents rather than humans. These are all things that we’re talking about here in Cannes, things that our team is working on and thinking about, and things that we need to do in the future to have an Internet that can support the agent traffic that we’re seeing.
