certainly, but for Google, that bandwidth and compute is a drop in the bucket. at the scale Google operates, even if there were a hundred such bots (there aren't - few companies can afford to store exabytes of data), those wouldn't even register on the radar. of course, like the other social media oligarchs, Google wants to be the only entity with unrestricted access to their catalog of other people's content, but even that isn't their motivation here - "login to prove you're not a bot :^)" was ALWAYS going to happen, even without the AI bubble.
enshitiffication is unstoppable and irreversible, and Google is its prophet - what they don't kill, they turn to shit.
>I think AI-companies abusing the internet is why things are getting more constrained in general.
even before the AI bubble, every other fuckass blog with 0.5 daily visitors was behind Cloudflare, for the same reason those fuckass blogs are built with FOTM javascript frameworks - there's nowt so queer as webshits.