Cloudflare's new marketplace will let websites charge AI bots for scraping

Because this will never actually happen

Preferably. You do not?
Maybe something like fair-use for the common folk but any commercial product has to pay?

This assumes that just since abuse could happen means we should block access for everyone. Folks might make illegal photocopies of books so we should ban libraries. I & others have done general scraping for our own uses that isn’t done in some abusive manner. But to assume a company beholden to US shareholder is going to “to the right thing” would be to go against the history of US corporations.

And you know who is going to be able to afford to do the scraping? Big US-based “AI Bros” that can do it with venture capital preventing the average user or researcher from grepping the net.

They are precisely deciding who can scrape what by sitting in the middle of like 30% of internet traffic & denying access. There is no way to tell if this ‘scraping’ is for research, hobby, commercial, or “AI” purposes; conveniently if it can make Cloudflare money, they’ll let you charge a toll. If Cloudflare cared about AI issues, they wouldn’t be having unpaid users solve/train their hCAPTCHA models just for visiting a site from Tor, a VPN, or even just a non-‘Western’ IP address. The fact that folks/businesses bought into this centralization is frightening—with little open access to information or allowing folks to stay anonymous (whatever their motivation).

Also don’t dare call someone “dumbass” if you can’t be bothered to turn on spell check or understand how commas work.

i think he is talking about 🤡strike debucle from fee month back.