> In 2022, Tech Policy Press received a grant from the Omidyar Network for a research project evaluating vulnerabilities in the design, engineering, and use of encrypted messaging applications.

https://omidyar.com/ is geofenced for me, presumably because they identified me as being anti open web.

The article is ai lobby intended to repel a bill that would

> allow the FTC to pursue penalties of up to $53,000 if a person uses a stealth bot in a way that is “reasonably likely to damage, impair, or burden” a website’s “technical or commercial operation.”

The definition of "stealth bot" is a bot that does not identify itself as such and their main grief to the proposal is

> If researchers cannot easily understand what it means to “deploy” a crawler in a prohibited way, or what activity is “reasonably likely to burden or impair a website,” they may refrain from scraping rather than risk violating the law.

Which is the biggest load of shit I've heard given that all you need to do is identify yourself as a bot and respect robots.txt or be banned, the status quo before a bunch of assholes started systematically destroying the internet.

"Knowing the identity behind a crawler tells us relatively little about whether its behavior is harmful. Under the New York bill, a company that discloses its identity and then accesses the website 10,000 times a minute complies with the law even though it is still imposing enormous and likely unjustified costs on the site. But a journalist anonymously using a crawler to investigate potentially anti-competitive practices by tech companies does not."

It does seem like this bill mostly affects normal users and is suspect with more surveillance being pushed. However the biggest problem is that the internet is global and the fees only apply to the US. If bots from Russia, China, India, or even France are scrapping then how would this even reduce the bots? Seems more like a new 'contempt of business model' is the purpose of this bill.

I don't believe there is a true way to enforce this.

Any bot is operating on behalf of one or more humans somewhere. Bots are good, for the most part.

The conventional way of doing web isn't efficient. If it were, no one would be complaining about bots. The way we do web is the thing that needs to be updated.

>"In 2022, a Pulitzer-winning Wall Street Journal investigation analyzed over 31,000 financial disclosures from 12,000 senior government employees, revealing that nearly a quarter of federal officials traded stock in industries their agencies regulated."

Ya know, on the one hand, I wonder how many federal officials own nVidia stock and stock of other AI companies...

But then again, on the other, I wonder how many nVidia employees (and those of other AI companies!) own government T-bills (and other government backed securities!) in their 401K or other investment accounts!

You know, everybody in large corporations and governments owning shares in other large corporations and governments -- adds a whole new level of meaning to "stakeholder capitalism"... :-)

(In the far future, there'll probably be small foreign governments which become their own ticker symbol -- and get publicly traded on various stock exchanges! :-) You know, like: "Would you like to buy a share in Denmark (DNMK) or perhaps Norway (NRWY)? I hear they're very competitive with Apple (AAPL) right now! Great price toearnings (PE) ratio!" :-) )