[charcircuit]

>Headless is open source, which means anybody could build a Headless version with such a property set to "I am a human, trust me!"

This is flawed reasoning. Just because we can't eliminate abuse from headless browsers that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to reduce it. Finding such a modified binary or making it yourself is additional friction that will cause less of these bots to exist. Some people may not care if a website is able to block them or not or some people may not decided to do the work to read the robots.txt. By implementing these capabilites into the product by default you are making the web ecosystem a better place wit less abuse. You are right that someone could make a version without the antiabuse parts, but surely that fork will be less popular and less used.

[Aeolun]

What about if I want the headless browser to look exactly the same? Why should we make a distinction between humans and machines?

[sagebird]

If I run a soup kitchen, and Google is sending robots to my establishment which are indistinguishable from humans, I should I have the right to ask if the client is a robot.

I would hope that Google's robots would not be programmed to lie to me, but would be honest.

If robots are required to be honest, then I have a choice to serve them or not. If they are not honest, I do not have a choice.

[charcircuit]

Then don't add code to your site to make it work different?

>Why should we make a distinction between humans and machines?

Because machines can be used to abuse a site at a scale that humans can't. Site owners want to protect their site against abuse.

[Aeolun]

By modifying the browser. It feels like DRM by a different name to me.

[charcircuit]

Okay? I don't care what you call it. It will reduce the amount of abuse in the world and that is a good thing.