As an engineer who works at a medium-large publishing company, am also interested in this direction.

I have fully read Cloudflare's proposal, as I have RSL, and L402.

In its current state, RSL is not a full solution, but can be. The spec does not cover payments. Its basically just a new token type, which crawlers would register for to crawl your content, and predefined responses for more detailed states. But nothing around payments, yet.

Cloudflare's solution is basically the same as L402. This is very sad for me, because their attempt is basically one of locking down the ecosystem in order to create a monopoly.

If they were really about creating a fair internet where "pay per crawl" is possible (it already was with L402), they would openly support L402, implement it for their gateway, and try to push the industry towards it. But no, they just want the biggest piece of the pie; a pie that doesn't even exist yet.

It seems there are multiple initiatives. Have you also read this one?

https://iabtechlab.com/announcing-content-monetization-proto...

Maybe people have agendas, or maybe they have different perspectives that should be reconciled?