What really confuses me is ... people always say, it's because companies are gathering data for AI training. Then why would they need to scrape the same page thousands of times per day?

Edit: the article says millions of times per hour? (!?)

The article is also astonished by this, and speculates it might be some kind of underground AI labs but... millions of them? Or does it only take one with too much money and a badly configured scraping setup?

Ironically in early 2023 a lot of websites went out of their way to block Common Crawl. Unsurprisingly that shifted scraping toward individual actors whereas the previous solution in research was to download CC dumps and process them.

I'm sure there are those who would participate, either because they want their data to be captured by AI labs or as a form of compromise.

That said, the approach is flawed. It looks like the people doing the scraping want everything. There are some people who do not want their data to be captured by LLMs. A common crawl would make it easier to those people to opt out, limit what is captured, or to poison the data. (I'm assuming the only way to avoid fragmentation is for the crawl to be done in the open and by consent.) Then there is the question of who would pay for the crawling and hosting. You could try charging for access to the dataset, but that would only encourage others to develop and sell their own dataset (especially since there are likely many who would want their interest in such a dataset to be confidential).

I agree, if up-to-data data was available somewhere else and free, there would be no reason to pay hackers and scrape.

You could perhaps even get website operators to "push" new data to a common crawl database. The scrapers would learn there is no value on scraping X domain because the data is available elsewhere more easily.

Feels like it would be a good time for freenet and the like to catch on.