[theamk]

Do you apply this ethics to webs scraping only, or to all other network communications too?

Because if that's your general principles, you are making the internet much shittier. I still remember the old internet with open SMTP servers, easy-to-use comment forms, and forums which did not require emails and capthas. But people with "You can respond however you like to my HTTP request" attitude ruined it with spam, scam and SEO.

If you only apply this to web scraping, then where do you draw the line and why? Can you scrape at maximum rate server can support? Can you scrape if this requires active action (like account creation?) As long as you scrape, can you also post some links to improve your SEO?

[cal85]

> But people with "You can respond however you like to my HTTP request" attitude ruined it with spam, scam and SEO.

I don’t see how those things relate. They all have separate ethical issues. You can believe it’s ok to scrape whatever info you can find online at the same time as believing it’s not ok to scam people.

[jMyles]

> Do you apply this ethics to webs scraping only, or to all other network communications too?

I mean... if you're keying in at 20MHz and blasting a gigawatt of noise, then yeah you've certainly run afoul of decency and just law. You're changing the physical shape of the network environment.

But if the concern is just that we don't like the bytes to which your signal decodes, or we don't like what you're doing with the response we give you, then it seems more like a speech/press issue.

The internet needs to grow resilience such that annoyances in the logical layers are easy to ignore if you have the will. But that almost certainly means that you don't get to police what people do with the content you willingly hand over, pursuant to the protocol in use.