Comment by graeme

If the traffic pays anything at all it's trivial to fund the infrastructure to handle the traffic. Historically sites have scaled well under traffic load.

What's happened recently is either:

1. More and more sites simply block bot, scrapers etc. Cloudflare is quite good at this or

2. Sites which can't do this for access reasons or don't have a monetization model and so can't pay to do it get barraged

IF this actually pays, then it solves a lot of the problems above. It may not pay publishers what they would have earned pre-ai, but it should go a long way to addressing at the very least the costs of a bot barrage and then some on top of that.