If you were asked to venture a guess as to what % of internet traffic is made up of actual humans using it, what would you say?  70%? 80%? If you guessed that it is handsomely over 50%, you may be mistaken.  It looks like it might be nearly an evenly divided pie:  Humans: 49%.  Non-humans: 51%.

The report, published by the internet security company Incapsula (and posted in Singularity Hub), identifies that well over half of that 51% is inhabited by “bad” bots.  Stated differently, about 25% of  total web traffic is malware! In and of itself, this is an alarming percentage.  Add to that the high degree of probability that much of this traffic goes unnoticed and unchallenged boils down to an (and this is an understatement) unhealthy environment.  And this isn’t a virtual problem.  It costs money.  Page-load times can be impacted by malware and, according to the Tag Man blog, even a 1-second delay “equals 11% fewer page views, a 16% decrease in customer satisfaction, and a 7% loss in conversions.”  That doesn’t sound good.

Reading all of this lead me to take another look at the Enforceable Content Management (ECM) post.  There I commented on the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), opining it was an incremental step in the right direction but unenforceable, and therefore, ineffective.  Its inefficiency is magnified by this infestation.

Intuitively, it appears that a significant catalyst for this malware proliferation is that website and content owners don’t have effective tools to monitor this.  But I will go a step further.  Even if these folks could monitor it, and try to stop it through, for example a “no-bots allowed” language in the browsewrap, (which some do) the remedies available by law for effectively dealing with this plight remain anemic;  they are unlikely to yield a noticeable reduction from that 25% activity.  (Reducing it by 2 points would arguably be “noticeable.”)

ECM, through the AiCE paradigm, is designed to efficiently address the unnoticed-and-unchallenged problem that allows this infestation to maintain its current levels and grow.  Since AiCE can take on different configurations, it could be designed in such a way to behave in an UNTAME-like configuration, presenting the malware masters with a much more challenging playing field to contend with.  In addition to creative variations of AiCE, should courts adopt and enforce the standard of a non-rebuttable presumption of implied assent to browsewrap terms (in B2B settings) that too would be a significant step in denting the volume of this damaging activity.

Tags: AiCE