We need to start doing web blocking for non-technical reasons

Blocking bots would solve 98% of the problem. We need something that does just that and only that. Once traffic becomes natural again, we can rethink the abuse problem. Charging per click or even per MB sent is an excellent idea that nobody will ever support. I wonder if that is even technically possible.

Mobile carriers certainly manage to bill per MB. But I don't think people would like their rates.

People forget that a lot of the information pre-web was somewhat pricey, and especially anything routed through a telco. The web drove prices to zero, which has had some bad effects and many very good ones.

Also newsletters, magazines, journals, etc. related to any interest you might have would require a paid subscription. Or a visit to the library, if you could convince them to subscribe.

Back in the 90s or early aughts, there was an article along the lines of “so you have an anti-spam scheme?”

It listed like 2 dozen spam control schemes that had been proposed that failed, mostly for social reasons.

If I had the link, I would have simply posted it as the reply.

Doctorow FTFW:

<https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt>

Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam...

Many problems in life are simple provided you have a perfect oracle that can distinguish good actors from bad actors. Alas...

agree, https://truesign.ai does just that. Bots and people behind proxies/vpns can't access https://demo.truesign.ai/protected-content for example.

I don't know, I run a social media platform for learning and bots are almost never a problem apart from occasional bandwidth spike. Most abuse comes from people, and we've definitely applied the principles from the article, because other way we would just get overmhelmed.

At least there would be an incentive to reduce size. I could easily got the same amount of information with the same quality when I had 3 MB/month 20+ years ago.

Sooo make bad behavior costly instead of just annoying

This is still predicated on correctly identifying "bad behaviour". Given distributed attacks and botnets (often utilising residental / "dial-up" equipment, whether desktops, routers, or IoT (the "S" stands for "security") kit), identifying specific network spaces as hostile still posits a great deal of collateral damage / false positive error.

Mind, I'm strongly in favour of what you're advocating, in theory. And I'm well aware that failing to accomplish this will make the Web far less useful for everyone. But the fundamental challenge remains difficult.

A lot of schemes I've seen proposed for this end up setting up a dollar amount spammers may choose to pay while pricing out most normal people.

I was thinking about charging per TCP handshake, or even closing their connection if the user is exceeding the typical throughput a human would need to use the site's service. Dystopian, but effective.

That’s the one!

I spent such a long time searching for it, including using LLMs. And yet you were able to take my misleading clues and find it.

I'd seen it before, had a pretty good idea what to look for.

Hadn't twigged that Cory seems to be a principle source/reference these days. I think I first saw this on Slashdot back in the day.