“The New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act is a set of common-sense rules that require bots to identify themselves and their purpose, and a necessary step towards transparency and accountability for bad actors.”
Albany, NY – Today, New York Senate Deputy Majority Leader Mike Gianaris introduced the New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act, a bill that would require transparency for online scrapers, prohibiting “bad bots.” This first-of-its-kind legislation will prevent bots from anonymously accessing news sites without authorization, and instead require affirmative bot identification for attempting to crawl and scrape these sites.
Danielle Coffey, President and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, said, “News websites are drowning in bot traffic. Bad bots are overloading our servers and scraping our content, impacting our ability to serve actual human readers. Publishers have tried to stop these bots on their own, but it’s almost impossible to stop them when malicious bots are able to disguise themselves and act with impunity. Market forces are not working to fix this problem – it’s time for the government to step in. The New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act is a set of common-sense rules that require bots to identify themselves and their purpose, and a necessary step towards transparency and accountability for bad actors.”
The News/Media Alliance has been closely engaged with legislators in the effort to draft legislation that protects publishers from bad bots.
Right now, many legitimate companies such as Google and OpenAI identify themselves in the crawlers that they deploy across the web. But some unscrupulous companies mask their identity and often their country of origin, in many cases imitating human traffic, which allows them to steal data or conduct cyberattacks without accountability. These bad bots are overloading the web, placing enormous amounts of technical strain on the websites of news publishers, libraries, and other providers of quality information.
This is a widespread and pervasive problem, one that publishers and cybersecurity companies have been unable to stop through technical means alone. Experts estimate that bot traffic on the internet now outnumbers human traffic. This bill would bring much-needed transparency to our online ecosystem, requiring bots to identify themselves and facilitating accountability when bots behave badly.
“Senator Gianaris has stepped up and demonstrated his strong support of the news and media industry and our vital role in providing quality information to New Yorkers by introducing this bad bot bill,” Coffey said. “We urge the Senate and the Assembly to quickly take up and pass this much-needed legislation to crack down on these deceptive actors.”
