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Comment by verdverm | Hacker News Reader

The website owner has rights too. Are you arguing they cannot choose to implement such gatekeeping to keep their site operating in a financially viable manner?

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The first article of our constitution says people shall be treated equally in equal situations. I presume that most countries have similar clauses but, beyond legalese, it's also simply in line with my ethics to treat everyone equally

There are people behind those connection requests. I don't try to guess on my server who is a bot and who is not; I'll make mistakes and probably bias against people who use uncommon setups (those needing accessibility aids or using e.g. experimental software that improves some aspect like privacy or functionality)

Sure, I have rights as a website owner. I can take the whole thing offline; I can block every 5th request; I can allow each /16 block to make 1000 requests per day; I can accept requests only from clients that have a Firefox user agent string. So long as it's equally applied to everyone and it's not based on a prohibited category such as gender or religious conviction, I am free to decide on such cuts and I'd encourage everyone to apply a policy that they believe is fair

Cloudflare and its competitors, as far as I can tell, block arbitrary subgroups of people based on secret criteria. It does not appear to be applied fairly, such as allowing everyone to make the same number of requests per unit time. I'm probably bothered even more because I happen to be among the blocked subgroup regularly (but far from all the time, just little enough to feel the pain)

If by "our constitution" you mean the U.S. Constitution then no, it says nothing of the sort. The first article of the U.S. Constitution concerns the organization of the legislative branch. You may be referencing the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses, in the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments, but neither of those applies in this situation either since there are no laws or governmental actions at issue here, and random sites on the internet are not universally considered to be public accommodations. Even in the ADA context, the law isn't actually clear, since websites aren't specified anywhere in the text at the federal level and there's no SCOTUS precedent on point.

Some states are more stringent with their own disability regulations or state constitutions, but no state anywhere in the U.S. has a law that says every visitor to a website has to be treated equally.

You can assume it's the USA and that I'm just dead wrong, but the third word of my profile specifies where I'm from and you'd find that this Dutch constitution matches the comment's contents

Equal protection is indeed not the same as equal treatment. No, it really does say that everyone shall be treated equally so long as the circumstances are equal (gelijke behandeling in gelijke gevallen)

I didn't assume, that's why I started my comment with "if by what you mean." Good to know that you were referencing a different place, but it's unrealistic to expect people to delve into your account bio to understand what you intended by "our constitution," especially when the parent comment also contained no geographic or cultural references. Perhaps you know the parent commenter and know that they share your geography? If so, that would also have been helpful context.

As an aside, I'm curious by how that language in the Dutch constitution actually works in practice. Is it just a game of distinguishing between situations or people to excuse disparate conduct? It seems like it would be unworkable if interpreted literally.

You have chosen to be blocked. Nothing forbids you from using different tech. This is not discrimination. Discrimination is when you are discriminated based on things you can't change (like race) or can't change easily (wealth). And if using VPN, you are lying about your origin, not to mention that constitution does not apply to foreigners who are not even in the country, just behind VPN. VPNs are grey area, nor allowed nor disallowed.

Do not apply laws where they do not apply.

I never said there was anything prohibiting them, just that they will be losing users. (Although, blocking some access can be illegal, for example when accessability tools are blocked.)

There's a whole spectrum of gatekeeping on communications with users, from static sites that broadcast their information to anyone, and stores that let you order without even making an account, to organizations that require you install local software to even access data and perform transactions. The latter means 90%+ of your users will hate you for it, and half will walk away, but it's still very common, collectively causing business that do so billions of dollers a year. (https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/02/15/91-of-u... to-install-apps-to-do-business-costing-brands-billions/)

When companies get big enough to have entire departments devoted tasks, those departments will follow the fads that bring them the most prestige, at the cost of the rest of the company. Eventually the company will lose out to newer more efficient businesses that forgo fads in favor of serving customers, and the cycle continues.

I'm just point out how a new fad is hurting businesses, but by no means wish to limit their ability to do so. They just won't be getting my business, nor business from a quickly growing cohort that desires anonymitiy, or even requires it to get around growing local censorship.

If you put your information freely on the web, you should have minimal expectations on who uses it and how. If you want to make money from it, put up a paywall.

If you want the best of both worlds, i.e. just post freely but make money from ads, or inserting hidden pixels to update some profile about me, well good luck. I'll choose whether I want to look at ads, or load tracking pixels, and my answer is no.

> If you put your information freely on the web, you should have minimal expectations on who uses it and how.

Does this only apply to "information" or should we treat all open source code as public domain?

All "open source" code was already pretty much public domain. All they'd have to do was put a page of OSI-approved licenses up on the site, right? An index of Open Source projects and their authors? Is this more than a weeks work to comply?

Free Software is the only place where this is a real abridgement of rights and intention, and it's over. They've already been trained on all of it, and no judge will tell them to stop, and no congressman will tell them to stop.

In a lot of circumstances, that is exactly the case. What the open source license stops is redistribution under terms that violate the license, not usage itself. An individual can very well take your open source code, make any changes they want, compile and use it for their own purposes without adhering to the terms of your license - as long as they don't redistribute it.

I'm not talking about ads or pixels, I'm referring to bot operators creating so much traffic that the network bill makes the hosting financially impossible

> my answer is no.

Rights for me, but not for thee?

You have every right to take the content offline, or to put any technical barriers you desire in place to access it - but that's about all you should be able to do.

If you don't want to lose money and don't feel confident that you can protect your content with technical measures, best to take your stuff off the internet.

I'm confused as to what you consider "technical barriers" that doesn't cover, say, using Cloudflare's solution. Or some other way of blocking things that look like bots.

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