20260113 Mehr Planwirtschaft ins Internet

90% of traffic is unnecessary and pointless

We are not referring to car traffic—for which a similar study would certainly also be useful—but rather to the waste of resources on the Internet. Just a few days ago, we reported on user behavior on normal telephones: ... more and more people are no longer answering the phone when it rings if the number appears to be unknown. This "unanswered call dilemma" now affects 80% of calls, according to an international study. Telekom has also recognized this as damaging to business ...

Under constant attack

When we look at our server, we also see that unknown parties are attempting to log into various services (mail, ssh, ftp, etc.) every second. This traffic is also unnecessary, pointless, and must be defended against using computing power and energy consumption.

AI bots

The situation is not much better with the web. Everyone will think that you can only view the existing pages, and that is the whole point. But even there, so-called bots or crawlers are at work to provide search engine operators with the information they then want to offer us when we search for content. Our “free market economy” also means that there are more and more crawlers out there—instead of bundling this kind of thing into a joint project. In theory and in practice, it would be very easy for website operators to provide their information in a standardized format.

In contrast, crawlers—now supported by AI—try to "think" for themselves about the content of the web. After moving our server to a different provider last summer, we suddenly had 30,000 to 50,000 daily visits to our website instead of the usual 2,000 to 4,000. It took 2-3 months for these bots to stop visiting us daily and start checking in only once a week to see if anything had changed. Many people are upset about this unnecessary internet traffic, including the Diaspora operator linked below. He writes: "Pretty much all of that is AI crawlers. My usual traffic from humans is less than 2req/s. The waste of resources on this is absolutely bonkers." At some point, energy is only being expended so that these bots can communicate with each other ...

We all have to invest our time, labor, and financial resources to deal with these excesses of the "free market economy". German Telekom is concerned about this because it costs them money, and with our flat-rate internet bills, we all pay for this nonsense without thinking about. A different economic system is urgently needed!