Matthew Prince, the CEO of web infrastructure giant Cloudflare, is continuing to beat the drum against Google and its Gemini AI — and suggested that some Google employees may be quietly sympathetic to his ongoing criticism of the company.
On stage at WIRED’s The Big Interview conference at the Midway Thursday, WIRED executive editor Brian Barrett asked about how Cloudflare could prevent Google from using its monopoly position in search to create a monopoly in AI. Prince was blunt in his stance.
“We could just block them,” Prince said, prompting laughter from the crowd. “We’re in that position to be able to influence what they do.”
Prince added that Cloudflare often receives emails from Google employees sharing his concerns and voicing their support for Cloudflare’s checks on the search giant.
“Every time we have meetings with Google, while they'll say, ‘Well, we're never going to do this,’ quietly we’ll get anonymous emails like, ‘Listen, there are a lot of us here at Google who still believe in the internet, still believe that we have to support it,’” Prince said Thursday.
A vocal proponent for an open internet, Prince has been outspoken about his concerns over Google’s AI-training strategies as industry competition ramps up. Google currently captures 90 percent of the global web search market, which Prince has said effectively forces anyone who hosts content online to feed their content to Google’s AI products in order to retain their search traffic.
Cloudflare provides backend web infrastructure and cybersecurity and has become an integral part of the modern internet. But how, exactly, they can fight Google remains unclear: There is currently no clear way for Cloudflare to block Google’s access to websites without impacting their search traffic.
At the Web Summit conference in Lisbon last month, Prince was even more direct, calling Google “the great villain of the internet today.”
