In my experience, most purely online auctions, other than eBay, do work that way. Numerous auction houses, for example, including essentially all the major ones, have their auctions online now: when they are hybrid, that involves online live bidding where an online bid will cause the auctioneer in the room to keep the lot open for more bids; when they are "timed" or "online only", times are extended in some way on bids near the deadline. It does, in fact, work much better. There is still an advantage to bidding very late: there is no disadvantage, and it lowers bids in cases of irrational or imperfect opposing bidders. But it limits that process to something that can be done by hand.
eBay really seems to be the only auctioneer using the snipable process it uses.
Completely agree with this. It's very odd that the eBay algorithm has a hard stop, as it directly discourages the price from rising when the bidding is hottest, and is absolutely susceptible to sniping.
This is how the popular car auction site bringatrailer.com bidding process works for cars sold on their site too, a quirk of which is that it makes watching the end of the auctions live online kinda fun, especially given the discussions that break out in comment section on each car up for sale while folks nervously watch the current candidate for the final bid cool down.
Much like your example, in the two minutes before the end of the auction, every new bid placed extends the auction clock by another two minutes, the winner hasn't won the auction until two minutes have passed with no further counter bids.
This how Trade Me (NZ auction site) works: any bid in the last 2 minutes delays the close time to 2 minutes after the bid. That can happen repeatedly, and I've seen it go on for over 20 minutes on highly contended auctions. It works well.
Guessing here - but they are probably relying on game theory / auction theory. They have a built in "sniping bot" - by allowing you to type your highest price, and it will auto-bid for you until that price.
The fear of being sniped encourages you to bid your maximum value, and not just wait and see if you can sneak in a lower bid. This is what all auction sites want.
Another eBay precursor auction side, onsale.com, had the same setup. The auction ended at X date/time or five or ten minutes (I forget which) after the last bid was made.
There is no need for that. They only need to implement a closing auction like stock markets. But eBay hasn't done anything since the 1990's except raise fees.
What's the point of sniping bots when eBay has automatic bidding? Counter-sniping is essentially built-in, if your price ceiling is higher then a snipers then you're guaranteed to win even if they bid at the last millisecond.
This was my belief for many years, but then I tried sniping (with the same prices I was putting as my maximum bid before!) and my success rate skyrocketed and the prices I was paying dropped.
It seems that despite repeated reminders and explanations, there are three groups of people using eBay "incorrectly" that make the sniping strategy viable:
1) People who do not understand proxy bidding and think that they "need" to repeatedly bid in increments.
2) People who are irrational about their price ceiling and are willing to bid above their price ceiling because they want to "win".
3) People who want to drive up the price either to deprive others of a good deal, or to drive up the price on behalf of the seller by starting a bidding war with the two above groups.
From a sellers perspective it is common to deal with buyers who won't pay because they paid "more than they wanted", although this is against the eBay ToS and a bid is a contract to purchase the item, because there are few consequences for not doing so.
For some reason, auctions with more bidders seem to attract more bidders, whereas auctions with zero bids seem to go unnoticed. I wonder if this has to do with eBay's search ranking algorithm or some other irrational behavior that I don't understand. At any rate, bidding with 5 or less seconds left to go seems to defeat the above behaviors. I find it distasteful and irrational but it works so I put up with it.
eBay's reputation and trust network is really what makes it a viable product at this point. Given how unreliable Facebook Marketplace buyers are and how many scams are present, I would hesitate to conduct any major transactions beyond a local area.
Snipers essentially convert the ascending-bid proxy auction used in eBay into a Vickrey second-price sealed bid auction, allowing a buyer to not reveal their preferences to other participants. In theory, with rational participants, this shouldn't have any effect on revenue. In practice, buyers do not always understand auction mechanics and delay setting the highest price they're willing to pay until they are outbid. If they're outbid 3 seconds before the deadline, they lost.
Establishing the price ceiling is difficult, though. You might arbitrarily set it as $23, but be sniped at $23.30. The sniper bot only needs to bid that small increment over your arbitrary ceiling.
Can you really say that $23 was your hard limit, or would you have paid $23.40? Unless you're buying something also available at retail, nobody can be that accurate in foresight.
Sniping removes the 'contemplation window' to reconsider your bid.
From what I understand, the reasoning behind the snipe method of bidding is to avoid showing to other bidders that there is interest, leading to the, supposed, outcome of more likely being the only bidder and thereby receiving the item at the sellers starting bid price (or slightly above) rather than at the "max one was willing to pay" price.
- bidding more than once and allowing time for others to counter bid drives up the price through competition for the item. Sniping also removes the temptation to counter bid, rather than to stick to your maximum bid.
- not sniping allows the seller to do ghost bidding, letting them discover your maximum price (including counter bidding). Here someone always out bid you (the ghost bidder) but the seller says the winner didn't complete the sale so offers it to you at your highest bid.
I've bought hundreds of things on ebay over the years and I've never understood the issue with "sniping".
Sure, I've been outbid at the last moment. Losing an auction is always a little frustrating. But if I was willing to pay that price I should have bid it myself. Feels fair enough?
And I prefer to use sniping bots because they let me revise my bid all the way up until the auction ends. If I put a bid on something and then sleep on it and decide I don’t actually want to pay that much, I can lower my bid or cancel it. If I bid with eBay directly then I loose that flexibility. It has nothing to do with trying to outsmart people or be sneaky.
why would you bid the highest price you can afford in an auction? the seller agreed to auction the thing; they could have just offered it for a set price.
This is most likely the reason. I could see a lot of "buy for me bot" users deciding that they really did not mean that color shirt (or some other reason) when they asked it to buy a "brand X shirt in size Y" and forgot to tell the bot what colors they would accept as options and did not realize the bot might buy an "electric purple" (or some other color they dislike) shirt because it was not constrained in color choice.
I think AI is going to level the playing field with all these bots that have been used for things like this (including scalpers for those low supply/high demand items), and retailers will (hopefully) have no choice but to address the issue once everyone starts to use/abuse them.
This was my thought as well, sniping bots have been around for as long as ebay has. Perhaps though, the sniping bots don't cause as much load on ebay's infrastructure?
Tried selling on eBay as a regular Joe lately? Item sold for roughly $190 and I lost $45 in fees - I didn't even have a premium ad or pay for any of the boosting.
At least in the UK, I don't lose any of the selling price to fees, 0%.
The buyer has additional buying fees on their side and postage is included in the final price.
The problem is with items that have a national market but not a local one. For example - there may be very few local buyers who will pay a decent price for a vintage slide rule, but many on eBay. My general strategy is to list on FBM first for the eBay price that I hope to get, and then accept offers down to 75% of the price. If I don't get any bites after about a month I switch to eBay.
As someone who hasn't sold on eBay in a looooong time but was thinking about it for some stuff I haven't been able to sell on Marketplace, their pages and pages of fee structuring were intimidating. What was the breakdown of that $45, if you don't mind sharing?
What is the use case for LLM agent shoppers? I can't imagine delegating the purchase of a used item to an AI (I'd be okay with AI identifying the best deals for me to review). This must be something for people who are doing something at scale like flipping items on Ebay or drop shipping.
I imagine this type of automation existed before LLM agents came along - what do they add? Is it just the ability to evaluate the product description? Item quality is already listed as a categorical variable.
My mistake, you're completely correct, perhaps even more-correct than the wonderful flavor of Mococoa drink, with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners!
"Hey, ChatGPT/Grok/GeneriBot4000, please watch for a great deal on a 1982 stratocaster guitar - must be in good or better condition, $600 or less, and if you see it, go ahead and buy it without confirmation"
Ongoing tasks, arbitrage for mispriced postings in ways that aren't currently exploited that LLMs make feasible - by banning auto-buy, maybe they're attempting to delineate between human seeming behavior and automation, and giving AI permission to buy looks too much like a real person?
Yeah I guess that makes sense for some people. I'm just not in a financial position where I'd let an AI buy a $600 used guitar without me taking a look at it first.
Drop shippers who arbitrage between major and minor ecommerce platforms need to maintain their listings, re-price things, etc. They don't care if the AI gets it wrong sometimes as long as they more than make back the cost of deploying it.
So now imagine ten thousand of these jerks telling their AI of choice "hey go scrape everything you can and re-list it for 10% more". That's a lot of load on the platforms at both ends for listings that are unlikely to generate many sales.
But that also seems like a very inefficient way to accomplish this automation task from the drop shippers side too. What do you gain from the LLM that non LLM automation couldn't do more cost effectively?
"Hey ChatGPT I want to build my own personal cloud storage computer, buy all the hardware for me then walk me through building and configuring it. My budget is $600, try to get the best deals and make sure that all the parts are compatible. I'm fine with used parts as long as they're a good deal and are in working order."
How do ticket scalpers make money? It's an automation war. You can run arbitrage strategies at scale if you can scrape markets with bots that understand unstructured data. Even if trades go wrong sometimes it can be profitable on average.
I might be out of the loop, but are agents actually out there buying stuff from "unwilling" vendors at any significant scale? I thought that was still mostly limited to opt-in partnerships with retailers. Still, eBay might be anticipating the issues you mentioned and trying to get ahead of them.
Not commonly known (I work in this space), but yes.
Agents are being used to automate things like non-cash account balance arbitrage, stacking and abusing marketing promotions, triangulated purchasing schemes, and purchase-refund arbitrage schemes at an increasingly large scale.
They may have an inkling that the big LLM companies will want to pay for future/past data... I imagine either Google or OpenAI has something predictive and shopping-related in the books.
Right -- this seems more of a protective measure than something they will proactively enforce.
If you have a well-behaved agent that uses a browser to buy on eBay, I doubt that will cause issues. But if it leads to issues, they can point to that clause instead of having to help repair the issues caused by someone else's software.
eBay is hyper aggressive about fingerprinting, they will catch things like it trivially. Browsers leak all sorts of information like what sockets are open on localhost, making yourself look like an actual person is very challenging to someone motivated to detect you.
LLMs don't need browser automation though. Multimodal models with vision input can operate a real computer with "real" user inputs over USB, where the computer itself returns a real, plausible browser fingerprint because it is a real browser being operated by something that behaves humanly.
No, but when instituting bullshit policies or trying to regulate natural/normal behavior for selfish gain, it helps you if you can enforce the policy, otherwise people will just ignore it.
Hasn't eBay's traffic been 80% bots since day one? I haven't participated in an auction in forever because even 20 years ago you were guaranteed to get sniped by a bot on anything except actual garbage.
Meanwhile Google announces UCP to go in completely the opposite direction (or make marketplaces like eBay do so)
So scraping bots and “buy for me” bots are bad, but the incredibly annoying sniping bots are OK? That sure feels like a double standard.
I never understood why eBay set things up to enable sniping.
Many years ago, there was an auction site called uBid. They had the sane rule: Bidding is open as long as there have been bids in the past 5 minutes.
So the end date could be January 24th, 3pm, but if someone bids at 2:58pm, the deadline is extended to 3:05pm. And it keeps going.
You know, like how auctions in the real world work.
In my experience, most purely online auctions, other than eBay, do work that way. Numerous auction houses, for example, including essentially all the major ones, have their auctions online now: when they are hybrid, that involves online live bidding where an online bid will cause the auctioneer in the room to keep the lot open for more bids; when they are "timed" or "online only", times are extended in some way on bids near the deadline. It does, in fact, work much better. There is still an advantage to bidding very late: there is no disadvantage, and it lowers bids in cases of irrational or imperfect opposing bidders. But it limits that process to something that can be done by hand.
eBay really seems to be the only auctioneer using the snipable process it uses.
Completely agree with this. It's very odd that the eBay algorithm has a hard stop, as it directly discourages the price from rising when the bidding is hottest, and is absolutely susceptible to sniping.
That's how whatnot does it as well (what eBay badly copied as eBay live)
This is how the popular car auction site bringatrailer.com bidding process works for cars sold on their site too, a quirk of which is that it makes watching the end of the auctions live online kinda fun, especially given the discussions that break out in comment section on each car up for sale while folks nervously watch the current candidate for the final bid cool down.
Much like your example, in the two minutes before the end of the auction, every new bid placed extends the auction clock by another two minutes, the winner hasn't won the auction until two minutes have passed with no further counter bids.
> https://bringatrailer.com/how-bat-works/
This is how Yahoo! Japan Auctions works. If an auction receives a bid in the last few minutes, it is automatically extended.
It works quite well!
This how Trade Me (NZ auction site) works: any bid in the last 2 minutes delays the close time to 2 minutes after the bid. That can happen repeatedly, and I've seen it go on for over 20 minutes on highly contended auctions. It works well.
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Guessing here - but they are probably relying on game theory / auction theory. They have a built in "sniping bot" - by allowing you to type your highest price, and it will auto-bid for you until that price.
The fear of being sniped encourages you to bid your maximum value, and not just wait and see if you can sneak in a lower bid. This is what all auction sites want.
3 replies →
Another eBay precursor auction side, onsale.com, had the same setup. The auction ended at X date/time or five or ten minutes (I forget which) after the last bid was made.
There is no need for that. They only need to implement a closing auction like stock markets. But eBay hasn't done anything since the 1990's except raise fees.
6 replies →
What's the point of sniping bots when eBay has automatic bidding? Counter-sniping is essentially built-in, if your price ceiling is higher then a snipers then you're guaranteed to win even if they bid at the last millisecond.
This was my belief for many years, but then I tried sniping (with the same prices I was putting as my maximum bid before!) and my success rate skyrocketed and the prices I was paying dropped.
It seems that despite repeated reminders and explanations, there are three groups of people using eBay "incorrectly" that make the sniping strategy viable: 1) People who do not understand proxy bidding and think that they "need" to repeatedly bid in increments. 2) People who are irrational about their price ceiling and are willing to bid above their price ceiling because they want to "win". 3) People who want to drive up the price either to deprive others of a good deal, or to drive up the price on behalf of the seller by starting a bidding war with the two above groups.
From a sellers perspective it is common to deal with buyers who won't pay because they paid "more than they wanted", although this is against the eBay ToS and a bid is a contract to purchase the item, because there are few consequences for not doing so.
For some reason, auctions with more bidders seem to attract more bidders, whereas auctions with zero bids seem to go unnoticed. I wonder if this has to do with eBay's search ranking algorithm or some other irrational behavior that I don't understand. At any rate, bidding with 5 or less seconds left to go seems to defeat the above behaviors. I find it distasteful and irrational but it works so I put up with it.
eBay's reputation and trust network is really what makes it a viable product at this point. Given how unreliable Facebook Marketplace buyers are and how many scams are present, I would hesitate to conduct any major transactions beyond a local area.
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Snipers essentially convert the ascending-bid proxy auction used in eBay into a Vickrey second-price sealed bid auction, allowing a buyer to not reveal their preferences to other participants. In theory, with rational participants, this shouldn't have any effect on revenue. In practice, buyers do not always understand auction mechanics and delay setting the highest price they're willing to pay until they are outbid. If they're outbid 3 seconds before the deadline, they lost.
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Establishing the price ceiling is difficult, though. You might arbitrarily set it as $23, but be sniped at $23.30. The sniper bot only needs to bid that small increment over your arbitrary ceiling.
Can you really say that $23 was your hard limit, or would you have paid $23.40? Unless you're buying something also available at retail, nobody can be that accurate in foresight.
Sniping removes the 'contemplation window' to reconsider your bid.
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The act of bidding itself shows interest and raises the price.
3 replies →
From what I understand, the reasoning behind the snipe method of bidding is to avoid showing to other bidders that there is interest, leading to the, supposed, outcome of more likely being the only bidder and thereby receiving the item at the sellers starting bid price (or slightly above) rather than at the "max one was willing to pay" price.
1 reply →
Sniping is the only way to bid for two reasons:
- bidding more than once and allowing time for others to counter bid drives up the price through competition for the item. Sniping also removes the temptation to counter bid, rather than to stick to your maximum bid.
- not sniping allows the seller to do ghost bidding, letting them discover your maximum price (including counter bidding). Here someone always out bid you (the ghost bidder) but the seller says the winner didn't complete the sale so offers it to you at your highest bid.
1 reply →
I have lost most of my bids to bots. Bots will literally bit at hh:59:59. The ceiling value doesn't work unless you bid way above the asking price.
Auto bid isn't the same as sniping. Sniping hides information about demand. Auto bid can't hide information as soon as there is another bidder.
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I've bought hundreds of things on ebay over the years and I've never understood the issue with "sniping".
Sure, I've been outbid at the last moment. Losing an auction is always a little frustrating. But if I was willing to pay that price I should have bid it myself. Feels fair enough?
And I prefer to use sniping bots because they let me revise my bid all the way up until the auction ends. If I put a bid on something and then sleep on it and decide I don’t actually want to pay that much, I can lower my bid or cancel it. If I bid with eBay directly then I loose that flexibility. It has nothing to do with trying to outsmart people or be sneaky.
I run up the prices in less competitive auctions just for fun occasionally, especially if I think someone is getting too good a deal.
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why would you bid the highest price you can afford in an auction? the seller agreed to auction the thing; they could have just offered it for a set price.
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Buy for me bots results in more returns, cancellations, item not as described and other problems ebay and sellers have to deal with
This is most likely the reason. I could see a lot of "buy for me bot" users deciding that they really did not mean that color shirt (or some other reason) when they asked it to buy a "brand X shirt in size Y" and forgot to tell the bot what colors they would accept as options and did not realize the bot might buy an "electric purple" (or some other color they dislike) shirt because it was not constrained in color choice.
I think AI is going to level the playing field with all these bots that have been used for things like this (including scalpers for those low supply/high demand items), and retailers will (hopefully) have no choice but to address the issue once everyone starts to use/abuse them.
I can only hope.
sniping bots keep people on ebay.com
This was my thought as well, sniping bots have been around for as long as ebay has. Perhaps though, the sniping bots don't cause as much load on ebay's infrastructure?
Scraping and buy for me bots cut out eBay. Sniping bots don't.
Smells like an opportunity
Oh so just “human review “ it
Tried selling on eBay as a regular Joe lately? Item sold for roughly $190 and I lost $45 in fees - I didn't even have a premium ad or pay for any of the boosting.
No wonder Facebook marketplace has destroyed them
At least in the UK, I don't lose any of the selling price to fees, 0%. The buyer has additional buying fees on their side and postage is included in the final price.
The problem is with items that have a national market but not a local one. For example - there may be very few local buyers who will pay a decent price for a vintage slide rule, but many on eBay. My general strategy is to list on FBM first for the eBay price that I hope to get, and then accept offers down to 75% of the price. If I don't get any bites after about a month I switch to eBay.
As someone who hasn't sold on eBay in a looooong time but was thinking about it for some stuff I haven't been able to sell on Marketplace, their pages and pages of fee structuring were intimidating. What was the breakdown of that $45, if you don't mind sharing?
Sure,
I listed the item as $185.00 + $10.00 shipping.
Order total = $195.00
- Transaction fees = $32.44
- Postage label = $14.65
Postage I can understand.
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What is the use case for LLM agent shoppers? I can't imagine delegating the purchase of a used item to an AI (I'd be okay with AI identifying the best deals for me to review). This must be something for people who are doing something at scale like flipping items on Ebay or drop shipping.
I imagine this type of automation existed before LLM agents came along - what do they add? Is it just the ability to evaluate the product description? Item quality is already listed as a categorical variable.
"Hey ChatGPT, I need more glass cleaner"
*OpenAI issues a micro auction to glass cleaner companies and distributors to see who will bid the highest combined commision*
"Sure thing! I ordered some Glass Clean Plus from Target for you!"
[Recycling a joke from many months ago]
My mistake, you're completely correct, perhaps even more-correct than the wonderful flavor of Mococoa drink, with all-natural cocoa beans from the upper slopes of Mount Nicaragua. No artificial sweeteners!
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzKSQrhX7BM&t=0m13s)
2 replies →
"Hey, ChatGPT/Grok/GeneriBot4000, please watch for a great deal on a 1982 stratocaster guitar - must be in good or better condition, $600 or less, and if you see it, go ahead and buy it without confirmation"
Ongoing tasks, arbitrage for mispriced postings in ways that aren't currently exploited that LLMs make feasible - by banning auto-buy, maybe they're attempting to delineate between human seeming behavior and automation, and giving AI permission to buy looks too much like a real person?
Seems pretty petty to me.
Yeah I guess that makes sense for some people. I'm just not in a financial position where I'd let an AI buy a $600 used guitar without me taking a look at it first.
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Yeah literally price mistakes being picked up right away. But also seems like a good way to get scammed.
Drop shippers who arbitrage between major and minor ecommerce platforms need to maintain their listings, re-price things, etc. They don't care if the AI gets it wrong sometimes as long as they more than make back the cost of deploying it.
So now imagine ten thousand of these jerks telling their AI of choice "hey go scrape everything you can and re-list it for 10% more". That's a lot of load on the platforms at both ends for listings that are unlikely to generate many sales.
But that also seems like a very inefficient way to accomplish this automation task from the drop shippers side too. What do you gain from the LLM that non LLM automation couldn't do more cost effectively?
1 reply →
"Hey ChatGPT I want to build my own personal cloud storage computer, buy all the hardware for me then walk me through building and configuring it. My budget is $600, try to get the best deals and make sure that all the parts are compatible. I'm fine with used parts as long as they're a good deal and are in working order."
You would really do this? You'd not even want to at least briefly review the cart before making a $600 purchase of used computer hardware?
1 reply →
How do ticket scalpers make money? It's an automation war. You can run arbitrage strategies at scale if you can scrape markets with bots that understand unstructured data. Even if trades go wrong sometimes it can be profitable on average.
Does it need a known and enumerated use case to be allowed? I don't like that implication.
An AI that shops for a blind user, for one free example of the untold and unexplored uses of new technology.
LLM-initiated purchases probably rack up chargebacks, support calls, etc for mistakes the LLM makes. I'm not surprised they want to limit it.
I might be out of the loop, but are agents actually out there buying stuff from "unwilling" vendors at any significant scale? I thought that was still mostly limited to opt-in partnerships with retailers. Still, eBay might be anticipating the issues you mentioned and trying to get ahead of them.
Not commonly known (I work in this space), but yes.
Agents are being used to automate things like non-cash account balance arbitrage, stacking and abusing marketing promotions, triangulated purchasing schemes, and purchase-refund arbitrage schemes at an increasingly large scale.
More likely, they want to be the exclusive provider of LLMs that can purchase off of eBay, or at least charge for API access.
They may have an inkling that the big LLM companies will want to pay for future/past data... I imagine either Google or OpenAI has something predictive and shopping-related in the books.
This; "certified / authorized by eBay" and then agents have to pay access to the catalogue
Right -- this seems more of a protective measure than something they will proactively enforce.
If you have a well-behaved agent that uses a browser to buy on eBay, I doubt that will cause issues. But if it leads to issues, they can point to that clause instead of having to help repair the issues caused by someone else's software.
...haven't bots been buying things off eBay since the 90s?
I loved early eBay but gave up on it once became clear how rife it was with bid snipers, fraudsters and stolen goods.
not the User Agreement!
Impossible to enforce, they can read browser windows and pass captchas
Probably less about direct enforcement, more about after the fact. Ebay doesn't want to deal with charge backs for hallucinate purchases
Yeah, they're hedging against "AI purchases". eBay has already been dealing with automated/bots for years.
> Ebay doesn't want to deal with charge backs for hallucinate purchases
A charge back doesn’t mean buyer always wins. Imagine if credit card companies also pass a rule - “LLM or AI purchases are non-refundable”.
On a different note - once I tried to cancel an eBay order within a minute, both eBay and seller declined. It’s so fked up with them.
This. These kinds of "rules" are basically useless because they are not enforceable. It's exactly like having speed limits but no cops.
eBay is hyper aggressive about fingerprinting, they will catch things like it trivially. Browsers leak all sorts of information like what sockets are open on localhost, making yourself look like an actual person is very challenging to someone motivated to detect you.
LLMs don't need browser automation though. Multimodal models with vision input can operate a real computer with "real" user inputs over USB, where the computer itself returns a real, plausible browser fingerprint because it is a real browser being operated by something that behaves humanly.
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> Impossible to enforce
Maybe, but a policy's or law's validity or importance are not contingent on them being enforceable.
No, but when instituting bullshit policies or trying to regulate natural/normal behavior for selfish gain, it helps you if you can enforce the policy, otherwise people will just ignore it.
No one wants AI to spend their money, checked or not. The few people who would want AI, want AI to save them money
Hasn't eBay's traffic been 80% bots since day one? I haven't participated in an auction in forever because even 20 years ago you were guaranteed to get sniped by a bot on anything except actual garbage.