In this interview, Robert Jacobi – Chief Experience Officer at Blackwall and a leading voice in the open-source and hosting community – speaks with Openprovider content editor Brendan Boyle about:
- The rapidly changing nature of web traffic
- How bots and AI are shaping new security threats
- Why security is no longer just preventative but a driver of performance
- Opportunities for registrars and registries in DNS-level security
- The future of WordPress and AI’s impact on content creation
- How user expectations are evolving in the “TikTok generation”
Openprovider: To start off, what’s your view on the current web traffic landscape? What major changes have you seen in recent years, whether in traffic volumes, the behavior of malicious actors, or their underlying intent?
Robert Jacobi: Over the last 18 to 24 months, we’ve seen a dramatic shift: there are fewer humans on the internet, even though the global population is growing. That’s the overarching theme.
If you go back in time, most internet traffic was driven by people – outside of DNS or email, which were still user-driven at their core. But with the rise of massive consumer platforms like YouTube or TikTok, along with SaaS solutions and how they interact with each other. Traffic today is increasingly machine-to-machine with less direct human interaction.
OP: That shift away from human-driven traffic brings us straight to the issue of security. How have you seen the volume and complexity of threats evolve? And are you noticing any new patterns when it comes to threats specifically around the area of domains?
RJ: Bots are everywhere. In the early days, these were generally good actors. Attacks were unsophisticated and easy to defuse – relying on weak passwords, bad security practices, or poor infrastructure.
Today, infrastructure across devices – iPhones, Androids, PCs, Macs – is much more secure. But bad actors are getting smarter – they’re building smarter bots to find loopholes in weak architecture. We see this with internet of things (IoT) devices getting hacked – it´´ not your computer that´´ going to get hacked, its a weak link in the chain.
Back in the day, attacks were manual. I was one of those kids trying to guess passwords!. That’s time-consuming and doesn’t scale. Modern bots are highly targeted. Phishing has evolved into spear phishing – highly personalized attacks like, “Hey Brendan, I think you dropped your wallet at the bar last night, can you confirm your details?”
And AI has supercharged all of this. Artificial intelligence is making all of this easier and more efficient to create those kinds of attacks. Now I don’t need to speak Dutch to run a phishing campaign in the Netherlands anymore — I can just have AI translate perfectly and send out thousands of automated attacks. That’s the real threat going forward.
BB: Many people think of security as purely preventative – stopping things from going wrong. But I’d love your perspective on how security can actually drive business performance.
RJ: There are two big aspects to this.
First, security has a direct operational impact. At Blackwall, we focus on DNS-level security – the first point of entry. If you can mitigate and evaluate traffic before it even hits your hosting infrastructure, you save money immediately. You’re spending less on bandwidth, compute, hardware maintenance, and replacement – it hits the bottom operational line immediately.
On the second level, there’s the benefit of being able to offer services from up and down that stack which creates a monetization opportunity. With DNS-based security solutions all of that traffic is being evaluated. We know that bout 35% of all traffic is “bad bot” traffic. By eliminating it, you reduce strain on your systems and improve user experience.
But not all bot traffic is bad. AI-driven scraping, for instance, can overwhelm sites with thousands of requests. Some scraping is valuable, but when it’s excessive, it degrades performance, thus creating a poor customer experience.
That’s why providers are now experimenting with AI paywalls — that will be the state of things going forward because of the abusive way these engines are crawling through websites. This again creates upselling opportunities for hosting providers in the industry who are able to monetize services that extend beyond the basic protection against bad bots.
For registrars and registries, DNS management is a huge opportunity. Many are happy just selling domains, but if you’re the first doorway into the internet, why not monetize that with enhanced traffic insights?
BB: You’ve also been very active in the WordPress community. Where do you see WordPress today, and what key developments should hosting providers pay attention to?
RJ: WordPress has been around for over 20 years and powers about 43% of the internet. From NASA’s site to your neighbor’s handmade crafts page, it spans every scale.
Its success is partly due to backward compatibility — sites built 15 years ago can still run today. That’s great, but it means that it’s harder to move forward and innovate in the space. The introduction of block editing less than a decade ago was a big modernization step.
AI is the game-changer now. Just this July, Matt Mullenweg and Automattic announced a focus on next-generation AI tools for WordPress that will speed up the entire experience — helping developers, designers, and content creators work faster.
AI is going to be critical, and given WordPress’s scale and ecosystem, I expect it to thrive for decades, though in evolving forms.
BB: What part of the web do you think AI will have the biggest impact on?
RJ: I think the biggest area will be around content creation.
There are only so many hours in the day, only so much content someone can write. AI can help repurpose content, generate snippets for social, or adapt content for different platforms. Designers and creators who aren’t deeply technical will be able to say, “Hey ChatGPT, I need a contact form on my site,” and AI will instantly build it and hook it up to tools like Google Sheets.
Given WordPress already runs nearly half the web, AI will likely boost its share even further.
BB: In a recent conversation, James Lee, Product Manager at WebPros, mentioned the rise of the “TikTok generation,” who expect fast, app-like user experiences. How have you seen expectations evolve in WordPress, and what does great UX look like today?
RJ: Expectations are completely different today. A generation ago, people tolerated bad digital experiences – Windows crashing, documents disappearing – as just part of life. The “TikTok generation”, who has never experienced those issues will find those issues completely and unacceptable – as they should!
They expect things to “just work,” the way we expect a light switch to work without thinking about the power grid behind it. From a WordPress perspective, everything needs to be just easier. Take out the options that don’t absolutely belong there – edit edit edit for simplicity, clarity and ease of use. Ironically that improves performance instantly: when you have less junk in the way, it’s easier for all kinds of services to deploy and be quick.
From a security perspective, we serve two customers. We have end users who want simplicity – click a button, and things just work. Hosting providers, meanwhile, need tools that are fast, easy to deploy, and reportable.
In both cases, simplicity drives better UX.
You can listen to the Openprovider podcast with Robert Jacobi in full here.
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