[sezna]

It makes sense and it is how the internet works. Servers cherry pick who sees their content all the time. Scrapers are often blocked, as are entire IP address ranges. Things like Selenium server scrapers can be (approximately) detected and often are denied access.

I’m not sure about being anti-competitive. Serving a website is an action in which you open up your resources for others to access. My friend runs an open source stock market tracking website for free. He started getting hit with scrapers from big hedge funds and fintech companies a couple of months back. This costs him around $50-100 a month to serve all of these scrapers.

[ericd]

If he gives them a stable, fast API with a subscription fee, and the scrapers are truly from hedge funds, he’s going to make a lot more than $100/mo.

[ddingus]

He should open up a Patreon, tip jar, something to get that funded.

Could also delay results, offer reduced temporal precision and other things to differentiate use cases.

[sezna]

He and I both have similar free open source websites with donate buttons. They are rarely clicked. Ad revenue over a month for me has been ~$400 while donations over two years have totaled $20. There are about 80,000 unique visitors per month.

It is nice to think donation platforms can fund high traffic open source projects, but this is simply not the case.

In any regard, I fear the potential of this ruling limiting developers’ ability to protect their servers and making us all roll over to the big players with their hefty scrapers taking all of our data for resale.

[bryanrasmussen]

how long are you allowed to delay results, I mean not serving results is just delaying them forever but that's out. Can I delay serving results longer than chromium's default timeout?

[rocqua]

Probably up to the point where a judge says 'this is blocking not delaying'.