I'm taking you at your word, and believe you're stating these things in good faith. As I hope you believe me. Yet I hope what you want never comes to pass. If it does, that world would be confusing, and our society will have lost something valuable.

For example, you say "nobody cares if you reload one page", implying there is a limit -- where is that limit? How many kids in a poor country do I need to hire in order to stay under that per-person limit and continue my business as usual?

> This is not about programs, it's about websites being crawled against the wishes of their authors.

This is very much about programs, because that is the only way anyone accesses a web site. Time-shifting is legal for TV, for example, and that's a good thing, even if broadcasters wish it was banned. We need parallels for the web that balance both users and site owners, and other than robots.txt as a frequently ignored handshake agreement, I don't know much that exists in this area.

Thank you for your condolences. I mentioned the relative passing primarily to explain my past tense and to be honest about not staying updated on that situation despite having been recently informed. They passed from age-related health problems after a good, productive life. I have their picture with a former US president on my wall, from the signing of a disability-related law. I believe my only bias in this area is that I have been directly informed through frank discussion, without the normal barriers you might imagine between non-relatives.