I completely disagree. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. What he proposes is just another flavor of technofascism, control disguised as ethics. These so-called humane scraping barriers will end up blocking humans, not machines. We have seen this before with CAPTCHAs, reCAPTCHAs, and all those “human verification” gimmicks, always bypassed by bots and always annoying to real people. Personally, I have nothing against crawlers; they should do their job and keep the web interconnected. Trying to wall yourself off is just meh. And those fancy licenses or “ethical use” terms won’t change anything either. The web is not the United States, and nobody really cares about someone’s imaginary social contracts. Maybe it’s time to accept a simple fact: once something goes on the web, it becomes public territory, and no one can still pretend to control the flow of information.

Fortunately this quixotic proposal is just some guy’s blog post.

@davel @hobata Is there something to this beyond the headline. I’m mildly annoyed by these posts that just link back to themselves. What the hell is that all about?
All I can take from the headline is, yeah, the consent model is basically Old West with richer Rancher Barons.