And Cloudflare is trying to legitimise a “business model” resting on the assumption that it’s ok for AI vealers to scrape content in the first place. “Opt-in” is not in Silicon Valley vocabulary.

I read that differently: we’re starting from the current world where anyone publishing online is seeing expensive traffic volumes from companies whose goal is not to send user traffic back. Cloudflare seem to be arguing that site owners should easily be able to charge for agent access independently from regular user access, but since that is always under the control of the site owner it seems like the opposite of your “opt-in” complaint.