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Bots have flooded the Internet

Infiltration harms humans' access to information

By: Donielle Coffey
Your Turn
Guest columnist

..... News publishers across the country are struggling with a uniquely modern problem. Their web-pages are being overrun with bots.
..... Content that this written for human readers is being consumed by millions of these automated crawlers that comb the Internet and often go out of their way to disguise their identity and steal content. These uninvited "bad bots," many of which come from China or other countries, are slowing down publishers' pages for suers and undermining a healthy content licensing market that would support continued community coverage, ultimately affecting countless newsrooms' ability to serve their readers.
..... Publishers have tired to stop these bots on their own, but they need help. Thankfully, Representativeness Laurel Lee, R- Florida, Valerie Foushee, D-North Carolina, and Gus Bilrakis, R-Florida, recently introduced there Stealth Bot Prohibition Act, a new piece of bipartisan transparency legislation that would required bad bots to disclose their identity and purpose, giving content providers the information they need to protect their work.
..... This is a simple, commonsense solution that is already receiving wide support from members of Congress on both sides of the aisle, and it couldn't come at a more urgent time.
..... Content providers all across the Internet, including web archives, libraries, health and financial institutions, and even responsible artificial intelligence companies themselves have reported a dramatic increase in the number of bad bots weighing down their websites. it's a problem so widespread that experts now say there are more bots then people on the Internet.
..... This new flood of traffic is changing the makeup of the Internet itself, and in the process, it is creating a significant financial burden for newsrooms both large and small.
..... With normal human activity, the costs of hosting a website - servers, electricity, bandwidth, etc. - are offset by users paying for subscriptions or viewing or clicking on ads. But bad bots don't click on ads, and they don't pay for subscriptions. They don't even browse a website like a human, with a few page views a day. They hit pages over and over again, sometimes millions of times in a single day. All that traffic can slow a website for human readers, and if it happens enough, it can trigger bandwidth over a charges, slower pages or even total outages. Many publishers, especially local news providers, are already operation at razor-thin margins and can't afford the higher technical costs that come with this deluge of bad bots.
..... To make matters worse, many of these bad bots take news content just to put it on a multibillion-dollar reseller market, one where AI developers buy news content from the owners of the bots, not the creator of the content.
..... They then sue that content to cerate substitutive products that directly compete with the publisher websites themselves. users have started getting their news and inquisitions answer by AI chatbots, rather than clicking on links to the original source of this information. As a result, web traffic for news sites continue to fall.
..... Reversing his trend is the first step in establishing a healthy licensing marketplace where content is rewarded as a valuable input for AI, just like investments in energy and chips.
..... the news industry - from the larges corporation to the smallest local newsrooms - has tried to block these bots using technical fixes, but bad bots are so advanced that they're able to disguise themselves to look like good bots or even humans.
..... Malicious foreign actors are now hijacking devices and servers in ordinary people's homes to act as "residential proxies," masking not only the identity of their bots, but their source as well.
..... These bots are so effective at disguising themselves that publishers simply can't keep up, and they are losing precious resources trying to play bot Whac-a-Mole. Instead, we need lawmakers to step up to protect quality content that requires tremendous investment to cerate.
..... The Stealth Bot Prohibition Act offers a simple solution. It doesn't ban bad bots outright but forces them to identify themselves, a commonsense transparency measure that gives news publishers the information they need to block bad bots themselves, with the Federal Trade Commission and other enforcement mechanisms to ensure compliance. Lee, Foushee and Billrakis are offering a recessional, modest standard, and ti's one that their colleagues in Congress should support to keep the Internet clean and protect the quality content that the American people and the world rely on.

..... Danielle Coffey is president and CEO of the news/Media Alliance, which represents over 2,000 news and magazine media outlets worldwide.

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