Cloudflare CEO: The Internet's Business Model Is Dead
Prince argued the ad-funded web is finished because agents don't click ads, and laid out Cloudflare's plan to make crawlers pay per access instead.
Matthew Prince
Co-Founder, Co-Chairman & CEO, Cloudflare, Inc. (NET)
The CEO view
Co-founded Cloudflare in 2009 out of Project Honey Pot; has pushed the company from CDN and DDoS protection into developer compute and AI inference at the edge.
Podcasts, interviews & articles
5 recorded appearances
2026
In the next two years cybersecurity companies will be busier than ever, says Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince
Prince said the shift to agentic traffic will drive a two-year surge in security workload, tying it to Cloudflare's investor-day positioning.
Cloudflare Needs 100M TPS from Crypto to Fix the Internet | CEO Matthew Prince
Prince predicted AI agent traffic overtakes human traffic in H1 2027 and said the HTTP 402 micropayment work with Coinbase needs ~100M transactions per second to be viable — roughly 50x what today's chains deliver.
The internet is breaking. So what's next? with Cloudflare's Matthew Prince
Recorded live at SXSW: Prince on AI bots outnumbering humans online by 2027, Cloudflare's front-row seat to Iranian cyberwarfare, and why he bought a local Utah newspaper.
2025
An Interview with Cloudflare Founder and CEO Matthew Prince About Internet History and Pay-per-crawl
Prince traced Cloudflare's bottoms-up founding and argued that the accumulated leverage over a fifth of internet traffic is what finally makes pay-per-crawl enforceable against AI companies.