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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

If you don't publish content to the public web anymore, you don't have to worry traffic or scraping or bots

Maybe it'll just be cheaper for CDNs or whatever to sell the data they serve directly instead of doing extra steps with scraping

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I think this is what will happen. That the public internet will become the place you go to seed the data you want to the scrapers and you will use a private internet for everything else. Private sites, private feeds, mesh networks, etc. We're basically going back in time similar to when AOL and friends had their own private networks for their members.

That sounds bleak, unless they also bring back Tradewars and LORD.

There are plenty of telnet-enabled BBSes that have both: https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/

There's a lot of this back-to-basics stuff out there: BBSes, Gopher sites, Gemini protocol, etc. A lot of it is very refreshing in comparison to what the modern web has become.

> If you don't publish content to the public web anymore, you don't have to worry traffic or scraping or bots

Similar to how if you demolish your house, you won't have to worry about burglars breaking in.

The only answer is WebDRM.

It's easy to pretend you're human, it's hard to pretend that you have a valid cryptographic signature for Google which attests that your hardware is Google-approved.

Crawling is the price we pay for the web's openness.

It's not hard to bypass attestation, it's actually very easy and done right now at scale, there's giant click farms with phones on racks.

They don't modify any device and will pass whatever attestation you try to make.

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