AI is absolutely going to make the internet unusable for half the planet if we don't find a better way; it's happening in realtime and I hate to see it. I would love to know of a better way, but everyone's so busy clamoring against effective solutions without proposing anything else that would work.

Doing nothing doesn't work. Doing Cloudflare isn't acceptable. Doing Anubis makes the Internet unusable "for half the planet". I'm on your side morally, but site operators can't afford to be idealists in the face of AI crawling bills.

What do you, does anyone, suggest that hasn't been tried, or adopted, or considered? What's left that will defend operators against AI's traffic flood that isn't eating a thousand doller crawler bill, paying Cloudflare, or locking out half the planet?