We can't have nice things because of AI scrapers

Something like this in practice breaks a lot of the adtech surveillance and telemetry, and makes use of local storage, and incidentally empowers p2p sharing with a verifiable source of truth, which incentivizes things like IPFS and big p2p networks.

The biggest reason we don't already have this is the exploitation of user data for monetization and intrusive modeling.

It's easy to build proof of concept instances of things like that and there are other technologies that make use of it, but we'd need widespread adoption and implementation across the web. It solves the coordination problem, allows for useful throttling to shut out bad traffic while still enabling public and open access to content.

The technical side to this is already done. Merkle trees and hashing and crypto verification are solid, proven tech with standard implementations and documentation, implementing the features into most web servers would be simple, and it would reduce load on infrastructure by a huge amount. It'd also result in IPFS and offsite sharing and distributed content - blazing fast, efficient, local focused browsers.

It would force opt in telemetry and adtech surveillance, but would also increase the difference in appearance between human/user traffic and automated bots and scrapers.

We can't have nice things because the powers that be decided that adtech money was worth far more than efficiency, interoperability, and things like user privacy and autonomy.

Is there a mechanism to indicate this? The "a" command in the Scorpion crawling policy file is meant for this purpose, but that is not for use with WWW. (The Scorpion crawling policy file also has several other commands that would be helpful, but also are not for use with WWW.)

There is also the consideration to know what interval they will be archived that can be downloaded in this way; for data that changes often, you will not do it every time. This consideration is also applicable for torrents, since a new hash will be needed for a new version of the file.

Require some special header for accessing them, without needing a API token if it is public data. HTTPS will not necessarily be required. Scrapers can still use it but it seems unlikely unless it becomes common enough; but if they do then you can remove that and require proper authentication.

Another is to use X.509 client certificates for authentication, which is more secure than using API keys anyways; however, this will require that you have a X.509 certificate, and some people might not want that, so due to that, perhaps it should not be mandatory.

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