The Broken Web

The open internet is being fenced — CDN, so the backbones for content, protecting their infrastructure from bots and VPNs.

Today I got blocked trying to access a website. Not because I was doing anything malicious — because I was behind a VPN. The same provider’s advice to get back in: disable your VPN and expose yourself. Meanwhile, bots already account for 51% of all web traffic in 2024 — and the sophisticated ones simply re-fingerprint and walk around the wall. The checkpoint stops the privacy-conscious human. The bot gets through. Everyone operating in this space must understand: the open, decentralised web is being replaced by access controlled by a few large intermediaries. That is not a technical nuisance. That is a structural risk.

References

• Imperva 2025 Bad Bot Report — bots surpassed humans for the first time in a decade at 51% of all web traffic: https://www.imperva.com/blog/2025-imperva-bad-bot-report-how-ai-is-supercharging-the-bot-threat/
• Cloudflare troubleshooting guide telling blocked humans to disable their VPN: https://developers.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-challenges/troubleshooting/challenge-solve-issues/