Technology

I'm a professional webmaster. While there is tons of bot traffic, not all of them are bad. Google has crawlers, which technically is also a bot. We have synthetics checks and uptime monitoring that are also bots but are very useful for the company.

There are a ton of bad actors, but saying all bot traffic is bad is not fair.

How much of the internet is automated should be the real question.

Wonder what the engineering solution to this could look like..

Thinking something like a zero trust model being required for all web requests.. Like the target address would need to receive a validated identity token from some third party but that token couldn't contain identifying info about the requester. Likewise, the validating third party would need to verify the identity of the requester without having knowledge of the target address.

Then that raises more questions like who would we all be comfortable trusting as a verifier and what data would we use for that validation? The validation system and the data used to validate would need to be provided for free too to account for low income people so no subscription services or hardware MFA keys. Also who counts as an identity to be validated?

What do enforcement mechanisms look like if this does get built? Are the validators entirely passive or do they actively participate in the process? Like do we have rate limits imposed by the validation engine or do we just leave that to the target address/organization to impose themselves? What happens if someone is banned from a site? Does the site notify the validators to drop requests earlier in the lifetime of a request? Do individuals get a lower request quota than corporations? Would you have to form a company just to prototype a new tool/product?

If someone seriously wanted to work on this I'd jump on the opportunity to work with them. It sounds like a fascinating project.