by DoctorOetker | 2026-02-27 06:45:53+00:00
You seem to not comprehend the concept of informed choice.

Upstream in the comments someone said they expect the EU might soon rule this type of billing illegal. That doesn't mean it becomes illegal, it just means yet another reaffirmation or reminder that - yes - this is indeed illegal.

You said that no fixed response -whether that is allow unexpected billing to increase without limit upon a surge vs serving error pages- will be accepted by the clientele, because some want it one way and others want it the other way.

Why would you force a single shoe size onto a population? Give them the choice. Whenever freedom of choice is violated in the name of market freedom, it is nearly always a violation of law, it's just a matter of hoping one lives in a jurisdiction that upholds its laws

> The issue here is, if you unintentionally try to make a billion expensive requests or allow someone else to do it against your account, do you want them to automatically turn off your stuff or do you want the bill that comes if they don't?

That is precisely the choice people are asking for! And it doesn't have to be just those 2 options: let the user define their own trigger formulas for different levels of increase: a small one might result in a notification delayed until certain working hours on weekdays and log each visitors reported origin (referer header), a slightly larger one might result in a notification during awake hours regardless of weekday or workday, yet a further larger consumption increase may trigger an unconditional notification, yet a further one might trigger an unconditional notification that requires a timely confirmation by the user/organization, in the absence of which a soft measure could be taken like adding a small header to the page being served notifying visitors that while still functional a hug of death may be in progress, and asking the visitors to paste the URL of the page from where they clicked the link to your site (to make sure that a full URL can be consulted in case the host operators are unable to find the hyperlink that led to their site from merely the origin domain), yet another increase in traffic may be chosen to result in specifically rate limiting users from the originator domains that caused the peak, so that your regular visitors from the past can still make normal use of the page, and so on.

Do freedom, choice, informed choice, preparedness mean something to you?

We could have an open standard configuration textual machine readable file format for these choices and settings, so that people can share their settings, and the machine readable format could have <private> tags to wrap around phone numbers etc to notify, so that people can easily run a command line program or script that censors those exact values and replaces the first phone number like "<private><phone>(+32)474123456</phone></private>" with "<private><phone>generic phone number 1</phone></private>" and the second email address in the file like "<private><email>john.smith@nonprofit.org</email></private>" is replaced with "<private><email>generic.email@address.2</email></private>", so that people can easily export and share such files, possibly hosting it like robots.txt but say billing_policy.txt so people can inspect how others handle these situations so that popular consensus policies can form.

Hosting, compute etc. services that allow users to configure such files and have them be executed by the hosting service will be more attractive than those which don't.