I have found these agentic blocks sort of inspiring and in the spirit of a free market. Amazon blocked my Muse, so I told Muse to find other vendors and prefer the shopify store for the brand. That was a pain for me to search through but AI has no problem.

It's funny. For a few days I had my own personal bot. It didn't browse many pages, but was enough to have me blacklisted from so many sites.

A lot of online retailers refuse to load for me as a human. But Amazon does. I used to avoid them in the past but guess who's getting my money now.

I'm not sure if this was your point, but AI will eventually just flow to the competitor that wants business and has the best price.

Want to block bots? Okay, watch your customers just seamlessly move to a competitor without requiring even the slightest thought or action from the customer.

Of course, if--somehow--customers moving to a competitor doesn't actually hurt the company they're moving away from... I might have to start questioning exactly how this whole "free market capitalism" experiment is working out. I think companies want to compete to win customers, but I'm not 100% sure anymore.

> but AI will eventually just flow to the competitor that wants business and has the best price.

This assumes that competitors will be willing to accommodate, which isn't always a given. I could easily see a ban industry-wide on agents for airlines to protect their pricing strategy, and the perceived administrative burden gives them legal cover against acting as a cartel.

> I think companies want to compete to win customers, but I'm not 100% sure anymore.

Companies don't want to compete if they can buy the competition instead. If they did, you wouldn't see mass consolidation across the economy (airlines are a great example of this). Cornering the market or getting bought before you're cornered is usually more lucrative than trying to compete.

I'm not so sure about that. Bluesky by large migrated from twitter aiming to escape the likes of Elon's politics, but they still brought over some of the most toxic cancel/brigade culture that twitter had to offer.

Not suggesting all of bluesky is bad, but it sure ain't the most pleasant crowd in it's own right either.

Bluesky, like Mastodon, is built on an open network on open source code. Run your own data server and moderation services that cater to your needs. Many are already doing it: Northsky, Eurosky, Blacksky, etc. If you want to live in a safe space isolated from the mainnet and its allegedly toxic users, you can do that too: Roundabout is built on ATProto but run on its own network, also Truth Social and Threads are forked versions of Mastodon but federated with nobody (Threads used to have opt-in Mastodon federation before Facebook decided they no longer want users to be able to do that).