Comment by asimpletune
11 days ago
It’s a step in the right direction but I think there’s a long ways to go. Even better would be pay-for-usage. So if you want to crawl a site for research, then it should be practically free, for example. If you want to crawl a site to train a bot that will be sold then it should cost a lot.
I am truly sorry to even be thinking along these lines, but the alternative mindset has been made practically illegal in the modern world. I would 100% be fine with there being a world library that strives to provide access to any and all information for free, while also aiming to find a fair way to compensate ip owners… technology has removed most of the technical limitations to making this a reality AND I think the net benefit to humanity would be vastly superior to the cartel approach we see today.
For now though that door is closed so instead pay me.
The problem with this is that people who want to make money will always be highly motivated to either find loopholes to abuse the system, outright lie about their intentions, buy and resell the data for less (making profit on volume), or just break in.
"Ah, it's free for research? Well, that's what I'm doing! I'm conducting research! Ignore the fact that once I have the data, I'm going to turn around and give it to this company that is coincidentally also owned by me to sell it!"
Literally this. It’s why I advocate for regulations over technological solutions nowadays.
We have all the technology we need to solve today’s ills (or support the R&D needed to solve today’s ills). The problem is that this technology isn’t being used to make life better, just more extractive of resources from those without towards those who have too much. The solution to that isn’t more technology (France already PoC’ed the Guillotine, after all), but more regulations that eliminate loopholes and punish bad actors while preserving the interests of the general public/commons.
Bad actors can’t be innovated away with new technological innovations; the only response to them has always been rules and punishments.
You can tell the difference between the two by checking if the Evil bit is set in the corresponding IP packet - RFC 3514 already standardised this.
If that doesn't work, you can also add rate limiting by enforcing compliance with RFC 1149.
The commons are not destined to become a tragedy and they can become a long-term resource everyone can enjoy[1]. You need clear boundaries, reliable monitoring of shared resource, reasonable balance between costs and benefits, etc.
> I'm conducting research! Ignore the fact that once I have the data, I'm going to turn around and give it to this company
Or weasel out of being a non-profit.
[1] https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
Hm. I hadn't understood the Tragedy of the Commons to be an inevitability, merely a phenomenon—something that does happen sometimes, not something that must happen all the time.
And unfortunately, in our current culture, at least in the US, it's much more likely than not when the circumstances allow it. We will need generations' worth of work firmly demonstrating that things can be better for everyone when we all agree to share in things equally, rather than allowing individuals to take what's meant for everyone.
> I would 100% be fine with there being a world library that strives to provide access to any and all information for free, while also aiming to find a fair way to compensate ip owners… technology has removed most of the technical limitations to making this a reality AND I think the net benefit to humanity would be vastly superior to the cartel approach we see today.
I can't help but wonder if this isn't actually true. As you've noted, if there's a system where it's 100% free to access and share information, then it's also 100% free to abuse such a system to the point of ruining it.
It seems the biggest limitations aren't actually whether such a system can technically be built, but whether it can be economically sustainable. The effect of technology removing too many barriers at once is actually to create economic incentives that make such a system impossible, rather than enabling such a system to be built.
Maybe there's an optimal amount level of information propagation that maximizes useful availability without shifting the equilibrium towards bots and spam, but we've gone past it. Arguably, large public libraries were just as close to that as using the Internet as a virtual library, I think.
I've explored this elsewhere through an evolutionary lens. When the genetic/memetic reproduction rate is too high, evolution creates r-strategists— Spamming lots of low-quality offspring/ideas that cannibalize each other, because it doesn't cost anything to do so. Adding limits actually results in K-strategists, incentivizing cooperation and investment in high-quality offspring/ideas because each one is worth more.