Matthew Prince, chief executive of Cloudflare (Photo by: David Paul Morris)

Search engines and publishers used to operate on a simple deal: publishers would let the likes of Google trawl their site, and in return Google would give them traffic. With the advent of AI, that deal is all but dead, leaving the internet’s old model under existential threat. Ali Lyon meets Matthew Prince, the man hoping to save it.

When, in 2022, a group of major publishers first approached Matthew Prince about the existential threat that artificial intelligence posed to their industry, the man responsible for protecting a fifth of the internet was understandably sceptical.

After all, ever since the 15th century, when gainfully employed scribes warned that the printing press would mean the extinction of high

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