> In 2022, Tech Policy Press received a grant from the Omidyar Network for a research project evaluating vulnerabilities in the design, engineering, and use of encrypted messaging applications.

https://omidyar.com/ is geofenced for me, presumably because they identified me as being anti open web.

The article is ai lobby intended to repel a bill that would

> allow the FTC to pursue penalties of up to $53,000 if a person uses a stealth bot in a way that is “reasonably likely to damage, impair, or burden” a website’s “technical or commercial operation.”

The definition of "stealth bot" is a bot that does not identify itself as such and their main grief to the proposal is

> If researchers cannot easily understand what it means to “deploy” a crawler in a prohibited way, or what activity is “reasonably likely to burden or impair a website,” they may refrain from scraping rather than risk violating the law.

Which is the biggest load of shit I've heard given that all you need to do is identify yourself as a bot and respect robots.txt or be banned, the status quo before a bunch of assholes started systematically destroying the internet.