I wrote an article about that last fall that got some attention here.
You try to block the tricks you used to get growth, basically.
It strikes me that the _ethics_ of web scraping are extremely straightforward and cognizable with a terse analysis:
* You can respond however you like to my HTTP request, and I can parse your response however I like.
Simple, traditional, common. This is the way that conversations have occurred since the dawn of human communication, no?
> the legal issues associated with it.
But aren't these, without exception, fabrics spun out of the cloth that shields established players with the threat of state violence? This is not particularly new, and seems to fit in the pathetic-and-predictable file.
Moreover, the broader cheap attempt to cast this in "intellectual" property terms, and to attach that to protection of artists and creators, warrants a very particular eye-roll for its illogic.
Because if that's your general principles, you are making the internet much shittier. I still remember the old internet with open SMTP servers, easy-to-use comment forms, and forums which did not require emails and capthas. But people with "You can respond however you like to my HTTP request" attitude ruined it with spam, scam and SEO.
If you only apply this to web scraping, then where do you draw the line and why? Can you scrape at maximum rate server can support? Can you scrape if this requires active action (like account creation?) As long as you scrape, can you also post some links to improve your SEO?
I don’t see how those things relate. They all have separate ethical issues. You can believe it’s ok to scrape whatever info you can find online at the same time as believing it’s not ok to scam people.
I mean... if you're keying in at 20MHz and blasting a gigawatt of noise, then yeah you've certainly run afoul of decency and just law. You're changing the physical shape of the network environment.
But if the concern is just that we don't like the bytes to which your signal decodes, or we don't like what you're doing with the response we give you, then it seems more like a speech/press issue.
The internet needs to grow resilience such that annoyances in the logical layers are easy to ignore if you have the will. But that almost certainly means that you don't get to police what people do with the content you willingly hand over, pursuant to the protocol in use.
In your analogy, most websites block everyone except the biggest pervert known to man.
Is someone forcing you to respond to requests you'd prefer to ignore?
The website owners make their preferences clear with robots.txt, IP blocks and other antibot technology. Scrapers intentionally ignore owners' desires and force the to respond.
Nobody (and certainly not the state) is going to erect your personal boundaries for you by ensuring justice in the face of spammy text messages (or, for that matter, hypnotic and manipulative social media). This is your job - maybe your most important job.
Just as its your job to protect your personal health and safety. Nobody (and certainly not the state) is going to do that for you.
Is there something about the trajectory of evolution of the internet that suggests to you that this is incorrect?
I observe continually (seemingly perpetually) increasing traffic, and continually (seemingly perpetually) increasing capacity for general purpose computing. I also observe enormous empathy and cyberpunk traditions in our communities, protecting each other. Do my eyes and ears deceive me?
Being a good neighbor requires restraining oneself and making requests with consideration for the other party.
Full disclosure: I worked for a price monitoring service that prided itself on crawling up to every 3 hours. Steps were always taken to mitigate the impact. Sometimes even asking hosts to allow-list the crawlers.
Sure, but for the purposes of this conversation, saying "for a reason" regarding a function which is presently delegated to the state is fraught with all sorts of future-proofing concerns.
It seems to me that, as a baseline, we have to agree to observe the apparent trend of the internet to supplant the state - to resist its censorship and influence almost entirely - as an indicator that our long-term thinking needs to put those relatively few state functions which are essential to a peaceful society (such as restraining orders) in the purview of the internet... somehow. Maybe that will prove to be unnecessary, but in the case that the state fades, we'll be happy we had the foresight.
Internet traffic is barely (and arguably, already not) under human control as it is. And in another century, it will almost certainly be impossible to tell the machines 'enhance your calm or else'. Or else what?
I agree wholeheartedly about your qualities of good neighbor roles. But I don't think they extrapolate the way you think they do.
Consider this: at every moment, your house - your literal dwelling - is bombarded with high-level, semantic radio traffic, from way down where the messages bounce off the ionosphere all the way up to 10GHz and beyond. But this doesn't bother you. You ignore what you don't need! You draw boundaries and personally work on strengthening them - with the help of your friends and neighbors.
The internet needs help taking this shape at the application layer (and really, at all layers). And that part is up to us. We can't just throw our hands up and say "<legacy state function> exists for some reason, doesn't it?"
I agree it would be ideal if the Internet could be as opt-in and benign as you suggest. Though I'm not even sure such an architecture is possible. How do you drive down the cost of listening and filtering to near zero whilst still allowing the desired signal?
And even if it were possible, consider that we do rely on governments to regulate the limited radio spectrum that we all have to share. Otherwise it wouldn't be an option to opt in to. The signal would be drown out by whomever has the strongest transmitters.
I don't know who "our" refers to here, but if humans are evolving into "the internet", or however you want to think of this creature which is emerging over the course of this century (and appears wont to accelerate over the next few centuries), then I don't think the state is "ours". We can't just cover our eyes when presented with the proclivity of the internet not to tolerate the state.
> I agree it would be ideal if the Internet could be as opt-in and benign as you suggest. Though I'm not even sure such an architecture is possible. How do you drive down the cost of listening and filtering to near zero whilst still allowing the desired signal?
Cryptography.
> And even if it were possible, consider that we do rely on governments to regulate the limited radio spectrum that we all have to share. Otherwise it wouldn't be an option to opt in to. The signal would be drown out by whomever has the strongest transmitters.
...really? Do you really believe that the state is a force for coordination and openness in radio?
The only bands which reliably continue to have these characteristics are the amateur bands, which have been defended by users for decades against constant encroachment by a state which, if it had its druthers, would've sold these bands to AT&T a long time ago.
My sense is that, if the government thought we weren't watching, they'd simply cancel the amateur radio license program. It is people standing to be counted (by taking the test) that keeps these bands viable _despite_ the FCC, not the other way around.
These days, you do not make money by doing web scraping; you make money selling services to web scrapers. There are tons of web scraping SAAS and services out there, as well as dozens of residential proxy providers.
Most anti-bot mechanisms evolve so quickly that you can make a decent income just by working in a traditional software engineering role dedicated entirely to engineering anti-anti-bot solutions. As these mechanisms evolve rapidly, working for a web scraping company is more stable than pursuing web scraping as a profession.
Web scrapers get paid by projects, making it an unstable job in the long run. High-level web scraping requires operational investments in residential proxies and renting out servers. Additionally, low-end jobs pay very little. Brightdata hosting a conference on web scraping, which should indicate the profitability of selling services in large-scale web scraping.
But you may refer to informal MeetUps or trade fairs; if so, google "Web Data Extraction Summit", "OxyCon Web Scraping Conference", "ScrapeCon 2024" (all past) or the forthcoming: https://www.ipxo.com/events/web-data-extraction-summit-2024/
There are some communities you can find in Discord, Telegram and most professional web scrapers are pretty active in LinkedIn and Twitter. The fun communities are in fact small groups of people with shared values and interests.
Instead almost immediately I got inundated by sneaker botters in China and in English from somewhere that doesn't use it as a native language, judging from the idiosyncratic use. I kept the code up for a bit but took it down not because of any legal threats (good luck with DMCA-ing a platform endorsed by the CCP, even though I have no love for the party, I also find the American attitude that places intellectual property over real property in practice - from my experience as a defense attorney - to be just as screwed up in terms of priorities, just a matter of degrees. What made me take it down was the fact that I did not want to work in a customer service job or really for anyone, and judging by the requests, it was mostly consisted of "you do the work but we'll split the profits", which I can't believe anyone would fall for.
But since the internet is forever, some parts of code that specifically worked to emulate Cyberfed-Akamai from 0.8 to 2.3 are probably still floating around. My bad. I don't wear shoes normally - flip flops or nothing after having to wear a suit to work for a decade - and have no idea beyond what happens in NBA2K. Although cybersecurity firms making products that someone who learned how to program in their mid 20s and put online within 3 years and had it work should be pretty ashamed of how much they charge, considering that I haven't even taken a math course since 11th grade and had too much of an ADHD problem to watch videos or even read more than blog posts or documentation. Everything I learned, I learned by copying from Github and similar services until it worked. There must be a lot of snake oil being sold out there, maybe most of it, since the insidiousness of the whole thing is that selling bunk solutions seldom gets you in trouble anyway, while actual crime - rape, murder, robbery and the like - are largely lagging because the police simply prefer to complain about culture war bs instead of actually, you know, do their jobs. Who knew Judith Butler was THIS spot on.
Many residential proxy and scraping experts are pretty active on LinkedIn. But they do not talk about scraping data, just news around web scraping.
Threat actors use Cloudflare and other services to gate their payloads. That’s a problem for our customers who are trying to find/detect things like brand impersonation and credential phish. Cloudflare has been completely unhelpful. They just don’t care.
Disclaimer: We operate in this space so we obviously have an interest in being able to detect these threats going forward.
As a webmaster I don’t want non-user traffic except search engines. It’s a waste of money and often entails security, privacy and commercial risk.
Without Cloudflare I’d achieve only slightly less effective results using an AWS WAF, another CDN, or hand rolling solutions out of ipinfo etc.
We intentionally do not provide an IP reputation service as many sophisticated bots mimic the "good reputational" aspect of IP addresses. Usage of residential connections or essentially being vetted by CDN/cloud services makes making bot detection ambiguous.
That is why we provide accurate IP metadata information. Whenever you detect patterns of bot-like behavior, look up the metadata such as privacy service usage, ASN, or assigned company, and then start blocking them via the firewall.
Closed partnerships programs are a bit concerning though. Once they’re up and running there’s an enormous economic incentive for CF to squeeze members with fees that capture the economic upside.
Not so good for security work.
It’s similar to their abuse reporting. They give your info to the site owner. Gee thanks, that’s just what I want to do.
What's the deal with "ill-adjusted" and "normal people"? I'm gonna say it right now, the reason why these individuals do this is because it's way more interesting and fun than building some bullshit React website for some boring business for the 20th time (this is just an example, not attacking React here, no need to freak out)
It's fun because you get to solve an actual real-world challenge and find new ways to do something. Same with things like developing exploits. Those who do this are not "ill-adjusted", they are in fact normal people that do what they are passionate about.
The whole mentality of "anyone who does something I don't like is ill-adjusted" is just absolutely insane.
It's a clear process, doesn't involve privacy risks or strange sneaky games, and tends to fail in ways that a human can at least see and report, as opposed to mysterious outages.
How much CPU time can you burn so people on 3 year old phones can see it, and how much will it cost scrapers?
Its better than captchas and whatever Cloudflare does in terms of overall nuisance.
Scrape like the big boys - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29117022 - Nov 2021 (189 comments)
What????!!! That's nuts
Have been puzzling what to do about the rejection cases. A single cheap android might just fill the gap.
A lot of the actors involved tend to be hustle culture types who think they are OWED your data, regardless of the ethics, laws, being a good citizen, whatever. They will blatantly disregard terms of service and hide behind massive setups such as these to circumvent protection etc.
And the problem is, if you run any sort of business or service that is data oriented, there will be thousands of people that will do this, which will cause you to devote enormous amounts of time, effort, money, and infrastructure just to mitigate the issues involved with data scraping. That's before you are even addressing whether or not these people are "stealing" your data. People who feel they are entitled to the crux of your business aren't bothered by being nice in the way they take it - they'll launch services that will cripple infrastructure.
Whenever I deal with a scraping process that decides it wants my entire business, and it wants all of it RIGHT NOW, or in 5 minutes, I want to find the person and sit them down in a room and tell them "hey, develop your own ideas and business. Ok? Thanks"
And if you think this was a problem before, it's exponentially worse over the past few months with every Tom, Susan, and Harry deciding they must have all your data to train their new LLM AI model. By the thousands.
Exhibit A: https://archive.ph/0ZUA8
This website is used to recruit people to set up "lead generation" Google Business Profiles and leave paid reviews.
Exhibit B: https://archive.ph/WWZuw
This is an example of the Craigslist ad used to initially attract people to the website above.
Exhibit C: https://archive.ph/wip/7Xig4
This is one of the Google Maps contributors which left paid reviews.
If you start with the reviews on that profile, you'll find a network of Google Business Profiles for fake service-area businesses connected through paid reviews.
Web scraping allows me to collect this type of data at scale.
I also use scraping to monitor the status of fake listings. If they are removed, the actor behind them will often get them reinstated. This allows me to report them again.
Cool use case. Love it. Fascinating stuff. But if Google told you to stop, would you? Or would you instead decide to build a 5 server cluster of 200 4G modems spread across continents to continue your work? Because if you did I would assume that you've decided to move on from a cute little altruistic process into a commercial use of someone else's data to make a profit.
If an organization puts a series of processes in place to prevent scrapers from wholesale taking data in violation of terms of service, and you develop a 5 server cluster of 200x 4G modems it's no longer "fair game" and you're directly being unethical in your use of someone else's services.
Available to someone meeting certain criteria (student discount, senior discount) doesn't mean available to anyone. I see no reason that "not available to be consumed by autonomous agents" is somehow invalid in a way that unlimited refills is only available to humans and not robots.
Maybe you should though. It's always worth it to think about which giant's shoulder you're standing on. It's giants all the way down.
Maybe it is not the opinion which is unpopular, but the way it is being presented.
That's a lot of righteous anger for somebody building a business on top of other people's data.
"Broadcastify is the worlds largest source of public safety, aircraft, rail, and marine radio live audio streams."
I have no sympathy whatsoever. You're just complaining about the very thing you're doing. If it's fair for you to do that, it's fair for others to do it to you.
Observing publicly available information is not theft, nor is it illegal.
Of course copyright rules apply, but that is for if you reproduce something.
No one is developing a 5 server cluster with 200+ 4g modems to observe publicly available information. They are using said cluster to deliberately work around blocks, rate limits, and restrictions on scrapers who are scraping content solely to reproduce the data and use it for commercial purposes (make money)
I want to grab new rental listings and put them in an RSS feed, so I only look at each one once.
That's my uses for data scraping right now. If that destroys someone's business, I don't actually care. Maybe it's selfish, but my right to re-format data for my own convenience outweighs their right to make a profit.
At the point where I'm scraping, the data's on my computer though.
It's often in a business's interest to format data in a specific way to make money, for example interlacing it with ads.
Exhibit A
But it's basically the same question as adblockers: Can I do what I want with the 1's and 0's on my own machine?
I'm not going to accept that I owe anyone a business model.
But I'm going to assume that you have some level of a conscious and you don't really mean you could give 3 shits about someone else's hard work so you can have some satisfaction at home. Because at face value that's exactly what you said.
It seems like you have this imaginary strawman that you hate and it seems like that's the foundation of why you dislike this.
“Hustle culture types” is simply a little anecdote about the types that would look you in the eye and tell you they are entitled to disregard what I said above. They’ll usually wrap it in some altruistic bs to justify as well.
ToS is nice but you can't expect that it applies - the user (of the machine doing the scraping) might be a child which makes the potential contract automatically void, for example. Also, there are people under jurisdictions where such things have no power, or that don't recognize your rights to the data.
And the whole thing of putting data out publicly and then just expecting machines to see the pile of data and go "oh so where do I sign the ToS?" is weird...
Just put it behind a rate limited API key...
There is a well-understood social contract here. I should not drive my car along the path, even if don't crush the flowers. I shouldn't walk on the flower beds, even if that sign isn't legally enforceable. And if a runaway lawnmower, RC car, or some other machine of mine does end up in the garden, I am responsible, because it was my machine.
With websites, there is even a TOS specifically for scrapers - robots.txt. The fact that it is easy to bypass or ignore is no excuse for actually bypassing or ignoring it.
The anonymity of the Internet functions as a ring of Gyges, where since people don't face consequences (even social ones), they feel entitled to do as they will. However, just because you can do something does not mean you have a right to do something.
Now let's say a photographer visits the flower garden, takes images, and sells them online as post cards? As long as the photographer is not hindering other people (flooding the site with repeat requests, in the analogy), it doesn't seem to be a problem.
On the other hand, let's say we don't have a flower garden, we have an art gallery or a street artist's display - or the pages of a recently published book. Now the issue is distributing copyrighted material without paying the creator... but what if there's a broad social consensus that copyright is out of control and should have been radically shortened decades ago?
The vast majority of data being scraped is not copyrightable creative work, however, so as long as you're not obnoxiously hammering a site, scraping seems perfectly ethical.
And again - there are countries where any ToS without explicit signature or other kind of legal agreement don't apply at all.
Just like writing "by using the toilet you agree to transfer your soul for infinity" on a piece of toilet paper taped somewhere in the vicinity of a toilet gives you nothing - even if it was a more reasonable contract, nobody agreed to anything.
As for your other point, I think this is more like standing next to a highway with a sign that reads "don't drive cars here" and expecting people to stop and turn around. They didn't even see your sign at their speed and it's kinda unreasonable to expect they would be checking for that kind of a sign on a highway. At least make it properly - big, red, reflective (e.g. a Connection Reset, or at least 403 Forbidden).
Our gardener should not need to build a brick wall around their public garden to keep your lawnmower out.
If I choose to make my data available to some businesses to make discovery of it easier, and I choose to decline to allow others to unilaterally copy my data to develop a different business, that's my right. And it is unethical and unreasonable for any other person to assume otherwise that they are entitled to the same rights I granted someone else.
If I own some data, I get to the be arbitrator of the who/what/when/where on the use of the data. Period.
There are many kinds of data that can't be owned at all. Actually it's the other way around - there is a very small subset of data that can be owned. You can try to cover it under some kind of a non-disclosure clause in a contract, but again - a contract would have to exist.
Because intellectual property doesn't exist.
What if you got that data from me/users and I/we claim the same rights (like GDPR for example)? Will you still honour ownership as above?
You damn right I do. I own, develop, and maintain the entire system that enabled the body of works to exist in the first place.
Do you think that you have a claim on ownership of the data because you drove by, saw what you liked, and decided that now you'll just rip the baton out of my hand?
I don’t think that meets the bar. Running a website is absolutely not equivalent to the collective effort people put in to populate that website with the information that actually gives the overall artifact its value. There is a large history of outrage when similar information repository websites with user-generated content violate expectations of openness. Nevermind the fact that the actual information itself isn’t even private or proprietary, just obscure and distributed.
> Do you think that you have a claim on ownership of the data because you drove by, saw what you liked, and decided that now you'll just rip the baton out of my hand?
I wouldn’t claim ownership nor want to, when I scrape stuff I usually just want information in a different format. I’m confused as to how you think you can even “own” data to begin with. Suppose that your users uploaded songs instead of RF info, do you believe you own their music solely because they chose to share it on your site? Do you think your users would believe that?
It's actually very simple. If I'm in a position to restrict access to the data, then I own it, unless there is some legal authority that has jurisdiction over me that says I must make it available to the public.
Your example illustrates this nicely. Walgreens owns the goods on their shelves regardless of shoplifters.
I can unilaterally decide whether or not you use my business, in any way shape or form, even if I just don't like you, as long as I don't violate any laws (discrimination etc).
Under these circumstances, how can a website operator feel any sense of practical control over scrapers?
So, in which jurisdiction are you? Because in US courts have confirmed multiple times that scraping public websites is legal.
- scraping is immoral
- we should bake DRM into the internet
There's no technical or legal difference between a scraping or web request, and I can't really believe that you think that non-scraping web requests are immoral, so I think that probably isn't your argument.
Moving onto DRM, I think most people don't want it baked into the internet. I think individual entities can choose to use it if they want--that's basically how you protect against scraping, so I think people irritated by having their content copied and thus devalued (or their ads replaced) should probably just do that.
Are you just trolling at this point?
_You are handing the baton over_ in an HTTP response. If you don't want to do that, then change the logic of your server.
Good grief man.
And the store, clearly and with a signed receipt, saying, "Here is the item you requested. Have a nice day."
This would be analogous to you thinking ancestory.com is "aptly hilarious" for arguing against someone just scraping their site for content.
What makes you think you should be entitled to drive by the very unique house that we built, and pointing right at that house and saying "I think I'll take that all of that for myself!"
Google’s original (and OpenAI’s) business model was also building a scraping infrastructure, system, and architecture, from scratch — and providing access to something that never existed in the first place.
Public safety communications are radio waves that are broadcasted and the ability to passively monitor them is enshrined in United States law. That is a massively key difference.
If I was sending data into your home from my infrastructure without any action from you whatsoever, and you were reaching up into the air and gathering it and repackaging it, AND the law said that I have no intellectual property rights to said data, then that's a whole different story.
You are trying to draw a distinction between data that is pushed and data that is pulled, and maybe there is some economic argument there in terms of resource usage, but that is very context-dependent.
In UK listening to public radio broadcasts is illegal. I think this law is idiotic and ignore it. It seems you do too since there appear to be streams from UK on your site :)
Please don't mix consensual and non-consensual scraping, the difference is huge.
Nobody cares how valuable you think your service is. Who's the judge of what's entitled to scrape or not? If you think you're the judge, I find it somewhat arrogant.
It is even more hilarious that you defend a position that, to me, looks authoritarian and individualistic. Might not be your intention, but it's what I read.
In short, we should have limits to amount of scraping possible, simply because humans can never be trusted past a certain point to remain ethical. After all, ethics at its first approximation is only a mechanism to improve societal cohesiveness, and it only works as long as the person doesn't have enough power to "do away" with society.
The Web (you said the "Internet", but you meant the Web) was not envisioned to be a commercial space. Your statement is antithetical to the original idea of the open Web. It's when the MBAs joined the party circa 2k and decided to profit out of it that all of these confused and wrong opinions about what the Web should be arose and that lead to the situation today. Your statement is a vast display of zero historical context. MBAs are obviously not very concerned with history. They just want to protect their own little turd for their own little profit and vanity, which is why they now put it behind a paywall, JS, and anti-bot proxies.
Why not both on a friday night?
"So you want to scrape like the unethical boys?" I guess doesn't scan so well. Bad boys maybe?
I'm pretty sure Internet Archive, etc don't in fact misrepresent what they are to crawl websites...
What's considered ethical is a very debated topic.
An assertion that something is simply "unethical" should be seen as the starting point of a discussion, not as a self-evident fact.
I find it really hard to see how you could twist ignoring this clear lack of consent, and going to great lengths to circumvent what was clearly put into place to prevent you from doing the very thing you are doing, how you could twist that into an ethical action.
It may or may not be technically illegal to do, you're but that is not a statement about what is ethical.
The property websites are incompetent to solve the problem, or don’t care, but either way they sure don’t want you scraping their valuable data.
Is it still unethical?
Try asking a startup for free software licenses or seats or whatever as a non-profit. "We're entitled to 40 seats of your SAAS solution because we're a non-profit working to solve world peace." It's definitely within the startup's pervue to respond with a no.
I run a search engine and an internet crawler. I do this all the time. To this date I've never had a webmaster that didn't permit my crawler access when I've asked nicely.
OK less provocative, you have new algorithm to identify inaccessible websites, your automation is scary good, crawling a site you can identify many issues that most sites would have to pay for a full audit to get, but now these sites have problems - if you can identify their sites as being inaccessible then they have to fix these problems due to various accessibility standards that apply in the regions they operate in. But if they don't allow you access then they can maybe make an argument they are accessible due to audit they did last year, at any rate they don't want to be forced to spend money on accessibility issues right now which it sounds like they might have to if they let you crawl their site.
Version 2 of above, some years ago I spoke about a job with a big time magazine publisher in Denmark and said one of the things that would make me a good employee is my knowledge of accessibility and their chief of development said they didn't have anyone with disabilities that used their site - so if I ask that guy to crawl their site why say yes? They have no users that would benefit!! Stop abusing our bandwidth bleeding heart guy.
Bullying websites into accessibility compliance will most likely lead to them following the letter of the standard without giving a second of thought as to whether the content is in fact actually accessible. It's very difficult to get someone on board with your cause if your initial contact is an antagonistic one.
I scrape and process websites of actors engaged in fraud. I do this to make the data more presentable to the proper authorities and to help uncover further evidence of their activities.
I suspect that asking for consent would be quickly denied and the data/evidence would quickly become inaccessible.
Is Marginalia opt in, then? Surely "not having a robots.txt" ("you didn't say no!") does not equal consent. And surely you could just ask all the webmasters you are scraping from for permission, since you have noble intent.
My point is that this is just hypocritical; you are placing the moral boundary right below what you are doing, while claiming moral superiority. If you ask others (e.g. anti-search Fediverse), they would think you are immoral too.
Both of these are the same?
Using and transforming information in useful ways is unethical if it results in a profit?
That's what our brains do, too.
Brains that consume information don’t destroy that incentive, they produce it.
Intermediating that and capturing all of the value for yourself is the unethical part, just like all forms of rent-seeking.
Internet usage and content creation are increasing, not decreasing.
I continue to publish comments, code, and images that presumably get used to train models. My incentive hasn't been destroyed.
> rent-seeking
Supply and demand set the prices.
Subscription services provide value and continue to invest in their product, catalog, and/or service. Property owners handle asset ownership and upkeep problems at scale.
Inefficiencies will be met with competition, and businesses not providing value will be out-competed.
Data under-availability is an inefficiency holding us back from bigger and better things.
I'm under no illusions that they would or would not honor that in the future, but that's the state today.