Don't click on the traffic lights: upstart competitor challenges Google's anti-bot tool

The days of clicking on traffic lights to prove you are not a robot could be ending after Google's decision to charge for the tool prompted one of the web's biggest infrastructure firms to ditch it for a competitor. "Captcha" – an awkward acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart" – is used by sites to fight automated abuses of their services. For years, Google's version of the test, branded reCaptcha, has dominated, after it acquired the company that developed it in 2009 and offered the technology for free worldwide. Google's introduction of charges for the service has prompted Cloudflare, a little-known firm that protects around 12% of the internet from bot attacks, to seek an alternative. The company's founder and chief executive, Matthew Prince, said: "It would have added millions of dollars in annual costs just to continue to use reCaptcha for our free users. That was finally enough of an impetus for us to look for a better alternative."