As someone who’s been on the web since the 90s I hate this.
The web was designed to be user agent agnostic. Desktop, phone, fridge, ai agents, curl, python script - whatever agent you are using shouldn’t matter for access. That’s the whole point of open internet, period.
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.
As someone who’s been on the web since the 90s I hate this.
The web was designed to be user agent agnostic. Desktop, phone, fridge, ai agents, curl, python script - whatever agent you are using shouldn’t matter for access. That’s the whole point of open internet, period.
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.