Cloudflare's verified bots program is a terrible idea. They want to be the central chokepoint for agents, and they're doing it in shady ways like auto enrolling customers into blocking agents.

Seems like Cloudflare wants to regulate the internet.. they should not have that power.

I disagree with the other top-level comments at the moment: I believe Web Bot Auth is a useful and non-centralized emerging standard for self-identifying bots and agents.

This press release today is a better statement of _why_ this feature exists (as opposed to the submission link, which is nuts-and-bolts of implementing): https://blog.cloudflare.com/signed-agents/

Web Bot Auth is a way for bots to self-identify cryptographically. Unlike the user agent header (which is trivially spoofed) or known IPs (painful to manage), Web Bot Auth uses HTTP Message Signatures using the bot's key, which should be published at some well-known location.

This is a good thing! We want bots to be able to self-identify in a way that can't be impersonated. This gives website operators the power to allow or deny well-behaved bots with precision. It doesn't change anything about bots who try to hide their identity, who are not going to self-identify anyways.

It's worth reading the proposal on the details: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-meunier-web-bot-... . Nothing about this is limited to Cloudflare.

I'm also working on support for Web Bot Auth for our Agent Identification project at Stytch https://www.isagent.dev . Well-behaved bots benefit from this self-identification because it enables a better Agent Experience: https://stytch.com/blog/introducing-is-agent/

No offense, but screw CloudFlare, screw their captchas for humans, and screw their wedging themselves between web operators and web users.

They can offer what they want for bots. But stop ruining the experience for humans first.

Why use a "web bot" instead of an API? Either can be driven by an AI "agent"...but this just seems like an "API key for a visual api interface", and rather wasteful in cost and resources. If a company could afford to pay a partner for an API key they wouldn't need this. If they can't afford to pay the partner for access -- they'd still be blocked with or without "Web Bot Auth". I don't understand what this is for.

I suspect I'm missing something, what am I missing?

Cloudflare is the last party that should be running this for two reasons.

1. THey have already proven to be a bad faith actor with their "DDoS protection."

2. This is pretty much the typical Cloudflare HN playbook. They release soemthing targeted at the current wave and hide behind an ideological barrier; meanwhile if you try to use them for anything serious they require a call with sales who jumps you with absurdly high pricing.

Do other cloud providers charge high fees for things they have no business charging for? Absolutely. But they typically tell you upfront and don't run ideological narratives.

This is not a company we should be putting much trust in, especially not with their continued plays to become the gatekeepers of the internet.

As much as I understand this is needed it rubs me the wrong way.

The standard looks fine as a distributed protocol until you have to register to pay a rent to Cloudflare, which they say will eventually trickle down into publishers pocket but you know what having a middleman this powerful means to the power dynamics of the market. Publishers have a really bad hand no matter what we do to save them, content as we know it will have to adapt.

Give it a couple more iterations and some MBA will come up with the brilliant idea of introducing an internet toll to humans and selling a content bundle with unlimited access to websites.