[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_state_(model)

How do you think search engines work?

Acme.com is welcome to require authentication for all pages but their home page, which would quickly cause the traffic to drop. They don't want to do this - like the coffee shop, they want to be open to public, and for good reasons.

Sometimes the use profile changes dramatically in a short time. 15 years ago, Netflix created the video streaming market and shared bandwidth capacity that had been excessive before wasn't enough. 15 years before that, Google did the same thing when they created search and started driving tremendous traffic to text based websites which had spread through word of mouth before.

Turns out the micro transaction people probably had the right idea.

waiting on the govt to do something is a path of failure

Who do you think writes these scrapers? Well, I mean aside from the vibe coded ones.