This was sadly always going to be the outcome of the Internet going commercial.

There's too much lost revenue in open things for companies to embrace fully open technology anymore.

It's kind of the opposite problem as well; huge well-funded companies bringing down open source project websites. See Xe's journey here: https://xeiaso.net/blog/2025/anubis/

One may posit "maybe these projects should cache stuff so page loads aren't actually expensive" but these things are best-effort and not the core focus of these projects. You install some Git forge or Trac or something and it's Good Enough for your contributors to get work done. But you have to block the LLM bots because they ignore robots.txt and naively ask for the same expensive-to-render page over and over again.

The commercial impact is also not to be understated. I remember when I worked for a startup with a cloud service. It got talked about here, and suddenly every free-for-open-source CI provider IP range was signing up for free trials in a tight loop. These mechanical users had to be blocked. It made me sad, but we wanted people to use our product, not mine crypto ;)

Wait until you hear many antivirus/endpoint software block "recent" domain names from being loaded. According to them new domains are only used by evil people and should be blocked.

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