Azeem Azhar sat down with Matthew Prince, co-founder & CEO of Cloudflare. Matthew is a rare operator with the vantage point to answer a simple question: if agents do the reading, who gets paid?

This conversation is a practical map of how AI “answer engines” upend the web’s traffic-funded model – and what could replace it.

Chapters:

(00:46) The currency of the web is dying
(06:08) Google's inflection point
(10:08) Why a broken business model might save the internet
(14:44) The incentivization of ragebait
(20:38) Content scarcity as a solution
(24:35) What could a new content business model look like?
(28:51) The challenge of pricing information
(29:31) How Cloudflare thinks about the creator economy
(32:06) Should smaller companies pay less?
(34:24) Can markets solve this without Congress?
(39:11) How does the agentic web affect content?
(43:40) A rare chance to redesign the internet

Produced by EPIIPLUS1 Ltd and supermix.io

Production and research: Chantal Smith, Hannah Petrovic, Nathan Warren and Marija Gavrilov.

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Inside the collapse of the internet econ...