Comment by szszrk
7 hours ago
Still calling it an "attack" feels like a stretch.
They literally had to pay for that "attack", no matter how many accounts they used.
Google was killing many websites for decades with their crawlers. Most large websites decided to create dedicated infrastructure for their traffic alone. Somehow they didn't participate in that cost and were not called the attackers.
> and were not called the attackers.
This is the mental mental leaps I'm struggling with here. Did you not live through that era where they were explicitly and repeatedly called out as 'attacks'? They were generally tolerated/hardenee around as they provided value-in-discoverability.
Just to ensure you don't gaslight yourself - I did live through that era and I worked on and supported a niche community (a MUD) where we did a lot of work encouraging marketing and discoverability through MUD forums as well as making sure our page was accurately and minimally keyword tagged and highly available for indexers.
In the time since that era search engines have transformed into platforms themselves that do engage in more parasitic behavior but it's important not to assume that the way it is now is how it always was - that's a rather defeatist path to walk down where you ignore awareness of the fact that there can be a highly profitable non-enshittified search engine that supports, rather than destroys, the ecosystem it benefits from.
It was better and, if we're diligent, it can be better again.
Ding. Ding. Ding. "Provided value to the content author". AI scrapping negatively impacts the content author with zero compensation. There is no mutual benefit.
> [Google] were not called the attackers.
They should be. But as the saying goes, one website/company dying is a "tragedy," lots of them dying at the hands of one company is a statistic of corporate growth. Or something like that.
And then of course when the tables turn on a company and they're the ones getting bombarded, they cry foul. Keep in mind Anthropic did many similar things that you mentioned Google did.
I think the term "attack" here is appropriate but not in the way Anthropic is framing it. Alibaba is clearly violating terms to extract data, so that's definitely not above board. But it's not like a DDOS attack where Alibaba is trying to attack Anthropics servers. Alibaba is simply doing exactly what Anthropic did to the rest of the internet, just targeting Anthropic and paying them to do so.