‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec
Seifert said that if traffic growth matches his predictions, “we’ve got to get a lot more efficient” – and of course volunteered Cloudflare’s service as a source of that efficiency. He also thinks more traffic from machines will mean more security threats. “It’s that what they’re selling is just a box, and it’s up to the customers in order to actually maximize the utilization.“The hyperscalers, the traditional first-generation clouds, are in the business of buying a server and then trying to sell it back, lease it back, and get five turns of revenue off of it,” he said.
- ▪Seifert said that if traffic growth matches his predictions, “we’ve got to get a lot more efficient” – and of course volunteered Cloudflare’s service as a source of that efficiency.
- ▪He also thinks more traffic from machines will mean more security threats.
- ▪“It’s that what they’re selling is just a box, and it’s up to the customers in order to actually maximize the utilization.“The hyperscalers, the traditional first-generation clouds, are in the business of buying a server and then trying to
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/networks/2026/08/07/humans-will-be-a-rounding-error-on-the-internet-says-cloudflare-exec/5284429 |
| Publication time | Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:40:23 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-07T05:05:44.673Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-07T05:05:44.673Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | XM5YNLu2diG4 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); networks ‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec Machine-generated traffic to surge 1000x in five years, while we meatbags keep clicking away slowly Simon Sharwood Simon Sharwood APAC Editor APAC Editor Published fri 7 Aug 2026 // 03:40 UTC Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert has run the numbers on internet traffic trends and predicted that human-generated packets will soon account for a trivial amount of overall traffic.The internet-grooming…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Register.
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