Hacker News Reader

Comment by akuyou | Hacker News Reader

AI is destroying the free internet along with everything else

My web host suspended my website account last week due to a sudden large volume of requests to it - effectively punishing me for being scraped by bots.

I've had to move to a new host to get back up, but what hope does the little guy have? it's like GPU and ram prices, it doesn't matter if I pay 10x 100x or 1000x more than I did, the AI companies have infinite resources, and they don't care what damage they do in the rush to become the no 1 in the industry

The cynic in me would say it's intentional, destroy all the free sites so you have to get your info from their ai models, price home users out of high end hardware so they have to lease the functions from big companies

View on HN

Then they use the data to deny you traffic. AI summaries are wrecking the independent web. Losing more than half or more of your traffic was pretty common in 2025. It’s killing the economics of sharing hard-earned information.

So we are spending more resources reaching a lot less people, because a few big companies are capturing the value for their shareholders.

And that’s while they’re still haemorrhaging money! Once they fully establish their monopoly and kill the open web, the enshittification will begin.

My prediction: AI is the deathblow to IPv6 adoption for the wider web, since blocklists only really work with IPv4. Increasing VPN usage making user tracking and heuristics difficult, AI scrapers stealing appropriated human content and AI spam poisoning its exploitation, not to mention tech monopolization and centralization, the limitations of IPv4 are suddenly becoming an asset and incentives for IPv6 support are zero.

On the plus side, we probably got all of IPv6 to build an alternative, non-commercial, better web or whatever network, if we act quickly before routing support is vanishing. IPv6-only housing is cheap, things don’t need to work out. There could be the IPv4-enforced corpo world within walls, and IPv6-enabled wild wide wonderlands.

There are ways to build blocklists for IPv6. I saw (used) once bloom filters for this. Inspired by some papers from the 2000s, this one in 2009 https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/publications-and-media/publi...

The point isn't the technical inability to block particular IPv6 addresses efficiently, but anticipating abuse potential by IP. You can change IPv6 addresses freely compared to IPv4. With IPv4 it's easy to determine, if you are dealing with a residential IP or VPN. No heuristics or analysis needed. IPv4 addresses are blocked preemptively, that's not really a thing for IPv6. Eg. VPN providers wouldn't have static endpoint addresses with IPv6. So you may be able to limit spontaneous abuse such as DDoS attacks, but it's a lot harder to filter technically legitimate traffic, which is merely unwanted for your data aggregation.

Is there anything against just blocking at the /48 level?

No, but subnets can't be as easily associated with unwanted traffic. If IPv6 gets blocked you just get another IP. A VPN or hosting provider can't simply rent, or god forbid buy IPv4 addresses and subnets, arbitrarily. The IPs they use are rather static and easy to discover. Rather trivial to block all them, preemptively. Residential IPv4 VPNs are not legal offerings and their use is limited. VPNs can fight traffic analysis, they can't fight preemptive IPv4 blocking.

See, it doesn't matter if it's somehow possible to control IPv6 traffic, factually, it is sooo much easier to control and observe IPv4. IPv6 adoption isn't going great at all and now there are new strong business incentives against it.

The direction we're moving right now isn't free intergalactic mesh networking, but holistic control and centralization by the tech oligarchy. IPv6 is good things... we can't have those.

> VPNs can fight traffic analysis, they can't fight preemptive IPv4 blocking.

How do you think VPNs are getting past VOD providers’ VPN block lists?

> Residential IPv4 VPNs are not legal offerings and their use is limited.

What’s illegal about them? And does it matter to uncooperative/aggressive bots?

> How do you think VPNs are getting past VOD providers’ VPN block lists?

In my experience, they most often don't. If you got more insights, please enlighten me. I presume VPNs which get past VPN block lists, are just not yet on the radar, or don't provide the privacy claimed, not actually fully in control of their infrastructure.

> What’s illegal about them?

Where do you think residential IPs are coming from? It's often botnets or otherwise compromised devices, or people tricked into sharing their connection. In any case, it's most certainly breaking the ISP's TOS. Because of the effort behind providing residential IPs, these VPN services are rather expensive. And certainly not trustworthy in regard to privacy. If offering residential IPs would be legal, every VPN service would provide them.

> And does it matter to uncooperative/aggressive bots?

No. They are used for mostly shady/criminal activity, where the limitations and legality don't matter. I doubt commercial LLM crawlers and data intense campaigns aren't bothered by legality, stability, connectivity or (upload) bandwidth limitations. Like, you wouldn't crawl the web on a mobile connection.

> blocklists only really work with IPv4

Do they? Why would it be any harder to block e.g. a /56 than a /24?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com