I'm pretty suspicious of Cloudflare's selfless efforts to "help build a better internet" here:
Think of it as some number of dollars per AI company’s monthly active users going into a collective pool to be distributed out to content creators based on what most fills in the holes in the cheese.
(Holes in the Swiss cheese being their anology for information or content people want, but that doesn't yet exist).
I suspect Cloudflare sees themselves as playing a pretty big role in running this "collective pool."
Making people or agents pay to read is just going to turn the internet into a copy of the music industry. We moved from people paying for albums, to people downloading albums via torrents, to Spotify apple music subscription style control of the music.
Now Spotify and Apple own the music, and we are all just paying to rent it every month.
I fear that Cloudflare's "collective pool" is going to create a similar dynamic for everything else on the internet: The middlemen will do great, but small content creators aren't going to see any revenue from this.
But more than that, they seem to have the whole thing backward: paying to read makes no sense -- we should be paying to get read, we should be paying to post.