this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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They did have a lot of concerns with abuse though and you can see that in the way the cookies debate went before they were supported in their current form. I think AI crawlers tanking bandwidths for websites and misusing the data they scrape would 100% be something the Mozilla from back then would've had concerns over allowing or encouraging.
You're conflating two different issues. The topic is "for whom the web is for?" not banwidth distribution and optimization.
If LLM bot is being abusive then that's no different from any other user agent behaving like this and we should expand these protections from intentional/unintentional ddos irrelevant of user agent.
I think your starting point (allowing bot user agents to crawl the web has overlooked benefits) is a good one, but things aren't black and white--there are clear drawbacks, too. Bots obviously have an orders of magnitude higher potential for abuse; to the point where bot traffic--as it currently stands in the real world--is qualitatively different from human traffic.
Sure, but targeted regulation based on heuristics (in this case, user agent) is also a widely accepted practice. DUI laws exist, even though the goals (fewer murders and safer roads) are already separately regulated.
Would it be nice if we didn't have to do this? Or there were some other solution? Sure, but I have no idea where to even start, unfortunately.