My recent experiments in AI-assisted web-scraping have brought home to me the growing extent to which the web is becoming ‘locked-down’. The motivating event for this retrenchment, of course, is the shocking growth in AI web-scraping, whose uncompromising demand for new data can end up taking domains offline. This is a good excuse for domains to do what many of them have wanted to do for a long time: make their content accessible only when the user is logged in (though naturally, Googlebot…