Comment by simoncion
7 hours ago
> A shop selling goods in $COUNTRY has very little to gain from allowing arbitrary users from any other country.
Eh?
a) Window shopping for the next time the out-of-country visitor is in the country.
b) An out-of-country visitor can contract someone who's in the country to purchase things from the shop and ship those things to them.
c) Queries and requests from out-of-country visitors can cause the shop to notice that setting things up so that they can ship internationally actually would be a money-making thing for them to do.
I do agree that the obscenely antisocial bots run for the benefit of the LLM Manufacturing Industry make it very hard for small-time operators to keep their websites up and running at any reasonable cost. Hopefully the major LLM Manufacturers will fail to secure enough funding over the next few months, their VC-backed primary customers will then have their money faucets shut off, and the attack bots will reduce down to a dull roar because folks have stopped paying "infinity" dollars for them.
All of the above fall under "very little". We're talking in the ballpark of 5% extra sales max, at the expense of double the infrastructure costs.
They're also stealing your curated dataset: if you take the time to correctly label your products, add specifications and manuals because you want this to be a competitive advantage, your work was just re-appropriated for the benefit of humanity. But primarily for your larger competitors willing to pay for it.