> As a user I want the agent to be my full proxy. As a website operator I don’t want a mob of bots draining my resource
The entire distinction here is that as a website operator you wish to serve me ads. Otherwise, an agent under my control, or my personal use of your website, should make no difference to you.
I do hope this eventually leads to per-visit micropayments as an alternative to ads.
Cloudflare, Google, and friends are in unique position to do this.
> The entire distinction here is that as a website operator you wish to serve me ads
While this is sometimes the case, it’s not always so.
For example Fediverse nodes and self-hosted sites frequently block crawlers. This isn’t due to ads, rather because it costs real money to serve the site and crawlers are often considered parasitic.
Another example would be where a commerce site doesn’t want competitors bulk-scraping their catalog.
In all these cases you can for sure make reasonable “information wants to be free” arguments as to why these hopes can’t be realized, but do be clear that it’s a separate argument from ad revenue.
I think it’s interesting to split revenue into marginal distribution/serving costs, and up-front content creation costs. The former can easily be federated in an API-centric model, but figuring out how to compensate content creators is much harder; it’s an unsolved problem currently, and this will only get harder as training on content becomes more valuable (yet still fair use).
> it costs real money to serve the site and crawlers are often considered parasitic.
> Another example would be where a commerce site doesn’t want competitors bulk-scraping their catalog
I think of crawlers that bulk download/scrape (eg. for training) as distinct from an agent that interacts with a website on behalf of one user.
For example, if I ask an AI to book a hotel reservation, that's - in my mind - different from a bot that scrapes all available accommodation.
For the latter, ideally a common corpus would be created and maintained, AI providers (or upstart search engines) would pay to access this data, and the funds would be distributed to the sites crawled.
(never gonna happen but one can dream...)
But which hotel reservation? I want my agent to look at all available options and help me pick the best one - location vs price vs quality. How does it do that other than by scanning all available options? (Realistically Expedia has that market on lock, but the hypothetical still remains.)
I think that a free (as in beer) Internet is important. Putting the Internet behind a paywall will harm poor people across the world. The harms caused by ad tracking are far less than the benefits of free access to all of humanity.
I agree with you. At the same time, I never want to see an ad. Anywhere. I simply don't. I won't judge services for serving ads, but I absolutely will do anything I can on the client-side to never be exposed to any.
I find ads so aesthetically irksome that I have lost out on a lot of money across the past few decades by never placing any ads on any site or web app I've released, simply because I'd find it hypocritical to expose others to something I try so hard to avoid ever seeing and because I want to provide the best and most visually appealing possible experience to users.
So far, ad driven Internet has been a disaster. It was better when producing content wasn’t a business model; people would just share things because they wanted to share them. The downside was it was smaller.
It’s kind of funny to remember that complaining about the “signal to noise ratio” in a comment section use to be a sort of nerd catchphrase thing.
> The downside was it was smaller.
Was this a bad thing though? Just because today's is bigger, doesn't make it better. There are so many things out there doing the same thing just run by different people. The amount of unique stuff does not match the bigger. Would love to see something like $(unique($internet) | wc -l)
Serving ads for third-worlders is way less profitable though.