What do we want the web to look like? Lock everything down behind logins, in the name of 'security' when the real goal is nyeh nyeh nyeh you can't see anything, sign up so we get more user metrics
The future on the eve of age/identity verification doesn't look bright at all. And in years to come, 10 or so, we'll be most likely seeing this corporate-provided SSO as the only way to access sites. They got us trapped already anyway so it's a matter for pushing with law and good marketing.
Sure they also just want everyone to make accounts anyway so it's absolutely a convenient excuse, but it's also real that ais are killing all public sites with constant massive scraping.
There was a thing recently about the kernel gitweb that ais are just clobbering because of the way they stupidly hit every possible valid url, and on a gitweb instance that results in a gobjillion duplicate clones of the entire universe for every tiny commit.
Google does not, AFAIK, engage in behavior like that (the latter), as much as I don't like a lot of what Google does