Comment by akuyou
1 day ago
AI is destroying the free internet along with everything else
My web host suspended my website account last week due to a sudden large volume of requests to it - effectively punishing me for being scraped by bots.
I've had to move to a new host to get back up, but what hope does the little guy have? it's like GPU and ram prices, it doesn't matter if I pay 10x 100x or 1000x more than I did, the AI companies have infinite resources, and they don't care what damage they do in the rush to become the no 1 in the industry
The cynic in me would say it's intentional, destroy all the free sites so you have to get your info from their ai models, price home users out of high end hardware so they have to lease the functions from big companies
My prediction: AI is the deathblow to IPv6 adoption for the wider web, since blocklists only really work with IPv4. Increasing VPN usage making user tracking and heuristics difficult, AI scrapers stealing appropriated human content and AI spam poisoning its exploitation, not to mention tech monopolization and centralization, the limitations of IPv4 are suddenly becoming an asset and incentives for IPv6 support are zero.
On the plus side, we probably got all of IPv6 to build an alternative, non-commercial, better web or whatever network, if we act quickly before routing support is vanishing. IPv6-only housing is cheap, things don’t need to work out. There could be the IPv4-enforced corpo world within walls, and IPv6-enabled wild wide wonderlands.
There are ways to build blocklists for IPv6. I saw (used) once bloom filters for this. Inspired by some papers from the 2000s, this one in 2009 https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/publications-and-media/publi...
The point isn't the technical inability to block particular IPv6 addresses efficiently, but anticipating abuse potential by IP. You can change IPv6 addresses freely compared to IPv4. With IPv4 it's easy to determine, if you are dealing with a residential IP or VPN. No heuristics or analysis needed. IPv4 addresses are blocked preemptively, that's not really a thing for IPv6. Eg. VPN providers wouldn't have static endpoint addresses with IPv6. So you may be able to limit spontaneous abuse such as DDoS attacks, but it's a lot harder to filter technically legitimate traffic, which is merely unwanted for your data aggregation.
4 replies →
> blocklists only really work with IPv4
Do they? Why would it be any harder to block e.g. a /56 than a /24?
Then they use the data to deny you traffic. AI summaries are wrecking the independent web. Losing more than half or more of your traffic was pretty common in 2025. It’s killing the economics of sharing hard-earned information.
So we are spending more resources reaching a lot less people, because a few big companies are capturing the value for their shareholders.
And that’s while they’re still haemorrhaging money! Once they fully establish their monopoly and kill the open web, the enshittification will begin.