> The LLM companies are not picking on me in particular, they are pounding every site on the net.

Why is not this a criminal offense? They are hurting business for profit (or for higher valuation as they probably have no profit at all).

Why are corporations allowed to do with impunity what could land even a teenager years in prison? Is there no rule of law anymore?

The five-year and ten-year penalties kick in only when the government can show the offense caused at least $5,000 in losses across all victims during a one-year period. https://legalclarity.org/what-are-the-punishments-for-a-ddos...

> Why are corporations allowed to do with impunity what could land even a teenager years in prison? Is there no rule of law anymore?

Those laws are intended to protect corporations. If corporations are the ones doing the scraping, it doesn't make sense for the same laws to affect them.

Normative vs prerogative state [1]. See US v. Swartz compared to Meta use of LibGen for Llama

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_state_(model)

His robots.txt explicitly allows bots including LLM bots to scrape his site

Because might makes right and any entity with the power to legally put up a fight is in on the game (or wants to be)

We've already established that computer crime and IP laws apply to normies and not tech companies

adapt or die

waiting on the govt to do something is a path of failure

I have added a DB replica server just to keep my website from succumbing to AI bot traffic.

It's a bit more like a physical business with a "public welcome" policy like a coffee shop going viral and then having tens of thousands of people walking in and taking pictures but not buying coffee. It's disruptive, but not illegal.

Acme.com is welcome to require authentication for all pages but their home page, which would quickly cause the traffic to drop. They don't want to do this - like the coffee shop, they want to be open to public, and for good reasons.

Sometimes the use profile changes dramatically in a short time. 15 years ago, Netflix created the video streaming market and shared bandwidth capacity that had been excessive before wasn't enough. 15 years before that, Google did the same thing when they created search and started driving tremendous traffic to text based websites which had spread through word of mouth before.

Turns out the micro transaction people probably had the right idea.

Because they have more money.

I've had to deploy a combination of Cloudflare's bot protection and anubis on over 200 domains across 8 different hosting environments in the last 2 months. I have small business clients that couldn't access their sales and support platforms because their websites that normally see tens of thousands of unique sessions per day are suddenly seeing over a million in an hour.

Anthropic and OpenAI were responsible for over 70% of that traffic.

> Is there no rule of law anymore?

Have you not been paying attention to the news for the past few years?

No, there isn't. If there were, Trump would be in prison, not the Oval Office. And he and the Republican Party have deliberately fostered this environment of corruption and rule-by-wealth so that they can gain more power and even more wealth.

And now they are also backing the AI zealots, and techbros more generally, to ensure that they can do whatever the hell they want, damn the consequences to the rest of the world.

Is what an offence lol? Bot scraper traffic?

How do you think search engines work?

Because the law deals with intent. The intent for a 12 year old skiddie with a ddos box is to harm someone else's internet. the intent of big scrapers is to collect data. if you want to make the latter illegal then vote for that instead of loading it with the normative baggage of the former.

It's the same problem as why Occupy Wallstreet fell apart: bunch of losers who don't understand the system screech about the system. because they don't understand it, they can't offer any meaningful dialogue about how to fix it beyond screeching.