Maybe the long-term solution for such attacks is to hide most of the internet behind some kind of Proof of Work system/network, so that mostly humans get to access to our websites, not machines.
The web is really stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to this. Proof of work helps website owners, but makes life harder for all discovery tools and search engines.
An independent standard for request signing and building some sort of reputation database for verified crawlers could be part of a solution, though that causes problems with websites feeding crawlers different content than users, an does nothing to fix the Sybil attack problem.
International law enforcement on the Internet would also subject you to the laws of other countries. It goes both ways.
Having to comply with all of the speech laws and restrictions in other countries is not actually something you want.
If you want to trade with me, a country that exports software, let's agree to both criminalize software piracy.
No reason why this can't be extended to DDoS attacks.
It really can not be overstated how unsustainable the status quo is.
BitTorrent is just as susceptible to this, it's just there's currently no economic incentive to try to exhaustively scrape it from 50,000 VPS nodes.
No, it really isn't. Unless you mean like on the BGP level. But it's p2p in the sense where you have to trust every party not to break the system. It's like email or mastodon, it doesn't solve the fundamental sybil problem at hand.
>BitTorrent is just as susceptible to this,
In bittorrent things are hosted by adhoc users are that are roughly proportional to the number of downloaders. It is not unimaginable that you could staple a reputation system on top of it like PTs already do.