> a stealth bot to access a website, digital platform, or online service in a manner that is reasonably likely to damage, impair, or burden the technical or commercial operation of a website or other internet service
"stealth" - what does that mean? This is largely a meaningless term. "damage, impair, or burden" - again, too vague. It would be good to specify something specific, e.g. so many tens of thousand of damage (reciprocal to the assumed fine - a journalist or user is unlikely to be reselling data at this scale, an AI scraper may incur or inflict such costs). "that is reasonably likely to" - this phrase is doing some heavy, heavy lifting, but like others have mentioned, there aren't very many "reasonable" examples, and those have to be defined in a court of law.
Like you and others have said, the immediate reaction would be legal departments essentially banning any and all access, because there would be room for someone to file a suit, and even if you win, there's no guarantee you get your fees back...
"stealth" means that it's not trivial for other people to block you from crawling their shit and
"damage, impair or burden" is in the eye of the beholder, the above person trying to block you from crawling their shit
Yes there will be patent-trolls attempting to squeeze this. Which is why it would be in the crawling entities' best interest to provide electronic means to opt-out and abide by them.
It works less well for other things, like, for example, white collar crime, even when it is low frequency, and even when it is built on financial concepts and norms that have existed at least for decades if not centuries, there's still plenty of gray area for reasonable doubt and spin.
It has pretty much not worked at all for computer and internet regulation except where it could be directly tied back to pre-internet crime definitions (eg. theft of funds). But data privacy, encryption, intellectual property, "hacking", etc, has all been a dumpster fire. And now we pour agentic gasoline on the whole thing? Our legal system is not equipped, least of all not with the current gerontocracy that is beyond clueless about any of this stuff.
It's the same thing here, a normal person will never run afoul of this law. It is entirely industry professionals who will be affected and they have legal departments who will figure out where the line is to the millimeter. Sure translating to legalese is hard and I expect this kind of legislation will be mostly common law after a bunch of lawsuits but the giveaway that it will be fine is that assigning "bot/not bot" to a given situation is something we all agree on in the industry. There isn't really that much borderline here. You can't accidentally build a web scraper operating off a residential proxy network and it's pretty obvious when you decide to disguise your traffic because you don't have the consent of site you're scraping.
Even the horribly contrived borderline examples boil down to "but I should have the right to actively deceive and circumvent security measures designed specifically to keep me out" which is a pretty tough sell.
Unless I'm missing something, most of the time you ask an agent to do any type of comparison or analysis between mtiple options offered online, scrapping will be involved at some point.
Anything that doesn't have a well-known and very public, free API will be a prime target for scrapping.
Its terms are so broad and ambiguous that they're already doing it and the thing you're actually relying on is that they wouldn't be prosecuted, which is an entirely different thing.
> It is entirely industry professionals who will be affected and they have legal departments who will figure out where the line is to the millimeter.
"The courts will sort it out eventually" is the worst excuse for drafting it poorly to begin with, and doesn't do anything for you during the decades it takes for that to actually happen.
> Even the horribly contrived borderline examples boil down to "but I should have the right to actively deceive and circumvent security measures designed specifically to keep me out" which is a pretty tough sell.
This seems like the thing where corporations co-opt the term "security" to mean "anyone doing anything we don't like" as if they had any right to that to begin with.
Journalists should be able to investigate misconduct. Customers and customer agents should have bulk access to pricing data. Real people shouldn't have to view the speech of other real people through the proprietary interface of a corporate intermediary that people only use because it has a network effect.