alt Hacker NewsI understood this as a tool to fight bot-net scraping. I imagined that this would add accountability to clients for how many requests they make.
I know that phrasing it like "large company cloudflare wants to increase internet accountability" will make many people uncomfortable. I think caution is good here. However, I also think that the internet has a real accountability problem that deserves attention. I think that the accountability problem is so bad, that some solution is going to end up getting implemented. That might mean that the most pro-freedom approach is to help design the solution, rather than avoiding the conversation.
Bad ideas:
You're getting lots of bot requests, so you start demanding clients login to view your blog. It's anti-user, anti-privacy, very annoying, readership drops, everyone is sad.
Instead, what if your browser included your government id in every request automatically? Anti-user, anti-privacy, no browser would implement it.
This idea:
But ARC is a middle ground. Subsets of the internet band together (in this case, via cloudflare) and strike a compromise with users. Individual users need to register with cloudflare, and then cloudflare gives you a million tokens per month to request websites. Or some scheme like this. I assume that it would be sufficiently pro-social that the IETF and browsers all agree to it and it's transparent & completely privacy-respecting to normal users.
We already sort of have some accountability: it's "proof of bandwidth" and "proof of multiple unique ip addresses", but that's not well tuned. In fact, IP addresses destroy privacy for most people, while doing very little to stop bot-nets.
> Individual users need to register with cloudflare, and then cloudflare gives you a million tokens per month to request websites. Or some scheme like this.
This seems like it would just cause the tokens to become a commodity.
The premise is that you're giving out enough for the usage of the large majority of people, but how many do you give out? If you give out enough for the 95th percentile of usage then 5% of people -- i.e. hundreds of millions of people in the world -- won't have enough for their normal usage. Which is the first problem.
Meanwhile 95% of people would then have more tokens than they need, and the tokens would be scarce, so then they would sell the ones they're not using. Which is the second problem. The people who are the most strapped for cash sell all their tokens for a couple bucks but then get locked out of the internet.
The third problem is that the AI companies would be the ones buying them, and since the large majority of people would have more than they need, they wouldn't be that expensive, and then that wouldn't prevent scraping. Unless you turn the scarcity way up and make the first and second problems really bad.