We need to take people who want to make WWW even worse for every non-standard use case, and force them to only ever browse through Tor forever.

Let's keep them on a steady diet of 403 pages and 99 cyclic captchas a day. And see how that changes their tune.

Blocking bots would solve 98% of the problem. We need something that does just that and only that. Once traffic becomes natural again, we can rethink the abuse problem. Charging per click or even per MB sent is an excellent idea that nobody will ever support. I wonder if that is even technically possible.

I am blocked from this post.

The problem with these blocks is that they always end up blocking normal users, making the browsing experience worse... the opposite of what the intention was.

I use a forum. The operator decided to block almost every IP range associated with a data center. The problem is that more people are using VPNs due to the spread of geo restrictions, local laws like age verification, etc. And so now I need to disable my VPN - assuming I'm using one - just to access the site.

Sure, but the problem is that you can’t easily block the worst actors. And automated blocking by IP or user agent is nearly pointless or counterproductive these days. It’s not entirely clear what actors this author is thinking of, but if you think you can effectively block AI harvesters, you are either kidding yourself, or committing to doing more work for this ethical ideal than is remotely worth the effort.

Did this article travel forward in time from the year 1999?

In the early days of the internet, there was definitely a good number of techies who were in control of the infrastructure and believed that as long as you don't mess with other people's toys, you should be allowed to roam freely online. But even then, this wasn't the universal consensus. You would still get shown the door for certain behaviors on the Usenet or on web forums. And many ISPs would still drop you for hard porn, gore, or piracy.

But today, the consensus is that tech companies are the guardians of morality. You can get deplatformed quite easily from all the major platforms just for saying things that others disagree with. Your private files in the cloud (and sometimes on the device) get scanned for contraband. Search engines and LLMs are carefully engineered to never say or encourage the wrong things, and to flag certain things for human review. You'd be hard-pressed to find an online platform or a Western ISP that doesn't bow to social pressures.

Ad-hoc blocking of bad actors is bound to be an endless futile game of wack a mole. The way I see things going, the internet is continuing to move away from an open web and into walled gardens. Those with resources will create large walled gardens like the gardens of Meta, OpenAI and Alphabet, each with their own issues and serving the interests of their owners. Smaller walled gardens will exist, but any time they grow anywhere near the scale of the global web of old, they'll face increasing challenges from bad actors anywhere from spam to scams to ai to propaganda and only those with resources will be able to maintain those walled gardens, and they'll only spend their resources on that if it suits their interests.

If the USA and Europe decide to got this way, they will be (as in many other ways today) followers, rather than the leaders. China already does large-scale net censorship.

What I read is just a thinly-veiled “Make shunning socially acceptable and mainstream again!”