2026-10-12 16:47 UTC
More and more sites are having to set up defenses from AI bots. It is costly to provide online services and they were not built for bots.
One can say that the AI companies are performing a global denial of service attack, which incurs costs to all of their competitors, as well as the rest of the Internet, while their own services can afford to withstand that load. The service owners are forced to perform costly operations to defend them selves, but also make the services worse for the users.
This is anti-competitive.
#AI #Regulation #Politics #BigTech
Replies (5)
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@troed@swecyb.com 2026-10-12 16:51
@jon@social.vivaldi.net The "defense" needed is an nginx bucket. Sure, it was nice running a site that never got slashdotted but let's not pretend that it's somehow difficult to handle the rather tiny crawler traffic. https://blog.troed.se/posts/nginx-meta-rate-limiting/
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@comrad@mastodon.social 2026-10-12 17:02
@jon@social.vivaldi.net I am happy to provide my nginx "bad bots" conf returning 444 to all those ai crawling bots.
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@DrinkyBird@mastodon.org.uk 2026-10-12 18:43
@jon@social.vivaldi.net And also like, denial of service attacks are just straight up crimes themselves.
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@Walker@infosec.exchange 2026-10-12 18:50
@jon@social.vivaldi.net I am sure that Cloudflare, Akamai, Edgecast and other edge providers / CDNs are licking their lips at the potential profits.
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@NSaynneDad@social.vivaldi.net 2026-10-12 19:47
@jon@social.vivaldi.net Well said!!