alt Hacker News> Taking your position to its logical conclusion implies that we shouldn't try to mitigate DDoSes either.
Not really. At any time you can, and should, choose not to reply to traffic that is wasting your bandwidth - ban IPs, use DDOS mitigation services, etc. My position is simply that regulation doesn't belong in this space, and it's ok for the 'net to be a dog eat dog world. Kind of what keeps technology advancing and exciting.
But who decides what comprises "wasting [my] bandwidth"? This is subjective.
Is it me (the site owner in this example)? If so: Since it's my subjective decision to make, couldn't I equally legitimately decide that traffic I serve to non-human entities is "wasting my bandwidth"?
To be clear, I'm not trying to make the case that there should be some law in place that prevents scraping or machine access across the board -- only that it would make sense for website operators to be able, optionally, to include that kind of usage restriction in an ordinary contract and legally enforce it by the usual means (lawsuits), in addition to any kind of technical restrictions they are able to put in place.