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Whether or not it technically qualifies as a "double standard," in practice I don't see anything inherently unfair about it.

If a stranger enters my house without my permission, that's trespassing. But there's nothing unfair about letting in someone who I invite over.




That's a terrible analogy. Your home is private, websites are not. The fact is that websites are posted online for all to see, so it's more like saying certain people at a park may take pictures while others are not allowed. That's unfair. If everyone could take pictures, it would be fair. Yes, someone with an old bright bulb camera might be annoying people, but nobody said "fair" meant all players would be nice or that having a "fair" policy would somehow be more beneficial to the website owner. It's not, that's why site owners are selective. So they have a double standard, but it's for their benefit, not that of the site visitors (be they human or bot).


How about the analogy of an art gallery disallowing photography? Is the gallery being hypocritical when they allow the local paper to take photos for publicity, or when they permit an archivist that has a known reputation to take photos for archival purposes?


You can still deal with the old bright bulb cameras: you can have rules which apply to everyone. So you can make a rule at the park that pictures are allowed, but only without flash, or that only digital cameras are allowed, or only digital cameras with the fake-shutter noises turned off, etc. As long as the rule applies to everyone equally, it's fair, even if you think the rule is silly.

For websites, it's not fair to have different rules for Google than others. What would be fair is some kind of rule about how often visitors can visit, how much they're allowed to download, etc.

Personally, though, I think all this is total BS. Sites are open to the public, but they also serve the whims of their owners. If the site wants to prevent access to people from a certain IP range, that should be their right. If they don't want any scrapers, that should be their right too, or if they want to allow Google and not anyone else, that should also be their right. What isn't right is that they can use the government to enforce these arbitrary rules. If they want to block my scraper, that's fine, if they can do it on their end technologically. If they want to block my IP, they can do that too. But suing me or having the cops come to my door because they're too incompetent or lazy to do these things technologically is unacceptable. The role of government is not to enforce arbitrary policies made up by business owners.


Using the law to block crawlers is more like saying:

1. Google can come in

2. Other Americans can't come in

3. Chinese people can come in (or anywhere else where US laws don't apply)

It might not be unfair, but it is certainly pointless and arbitrary.


To be fair, many companies which take anti-scraping seriously will also take inputs like geographic origin of a request into consideration when applying request throttling and filtering.




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