Hacker News Reader

Comment by ImPostingOnHN | Hacker News Reader

I don't think regulation will stop web scraping, not least of which because it can be done from locations outside the jurisdiction of the regulations.

> we have to acknowledge the system is broken

The system is broken. It probably takes, what, 10 seconds or less to use a residential or foreign proxy, 6+ months to internationally track and prosecute a single offender? So like a million times more effort going the regulatory route.

View on HN

Just as criminal laws don't end all crimes, copyright laws and anti-scraping regulation won't end all scraping. But it will greatly reduce it and limit it to rogue actors. Two examples I can cite here are the laws against email spams and laws against unsolicited marketing calls - they had a definite impact in reducing both (even in India, from where I am, where implementation of laws are often lax).

Exactly. Bot activity is a problem of volume, not all-or-nothing. Solving 95% of it would be a win.

I basically agree that the idea should be to reduce, not eliminate, bots.

However, a big difference with crimes involving the internet is that they can be launched from anywhere. In the real world, I can't steal from someone unless I'm physically present in the same country as my victim. On the internet, the US could outlaw scraping and Russia would keep doing it.

We already have ways to deal with badly behaving countries.

One thing I want to know is how porn spam (that is, spam containing pornographic image attachments) vanished so suddenly in the early 2000s. It used to be a huge segment of spam, and then one day it all just vanished.

So.. what made it go away, and how could learning about that help us make all the rest of it go away too?

Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal stopped processing payments for adult sites that used deceptive marketing. Hosting providers terminated accounts that sent image-based spam because the legal risk was too high. The same approach would work for other spam types. Target the payment processors, the hosting providers and make spam financially unsustainable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com