They are all platforms: news companies, publishing houses, ISPs, recording labels, YouTube, Google, Meta, TikTok, Windows, App Store, Play Store, Amazon.. and as platforms they squeeze both the layer above and the one below, their customers and their providers.

You know what that looks like? rent. It looks like home owners setting rent as high as the market can bear, until it becomes almost no advantage at all to participate.

It sure looks like Cloudflare wants to be the platform for AI royalty collections. But creators, customers, sellers - they are all hostage to the platforms they can't avoid. That is where the money sink is.