This is a terrible thing.
(((Cloudflare))) is going to create a permission system for the Internet whereby you need a key to prove that you have permission to access pages. This is the beginning of the actual corporatization of Internet access controls.
The best part about this is that Cloudflare performed their own problem reaction solution, twice. The first (all of this is just purely opinion, nothing more...) was them allegedly attacking popular websites so that they'd sign up for Cloudflare. The next was ruining the UX of visiting these already-shit websites by adding captchas and waiting pages so that people would be OK with handing them the keys (literally) to the Internet.
It could be even more subtle, give you different sites depending on who you are, or make the site flaky if you're an undesired person.
Or punish sites for serving information to you since you're an enemy of the people.
Charge them a higher rate.
So captchas work like the antigen tests, only as a step towards submitting to the real control mechanism.
(post is archived)