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Not to mention, actually malicious traffic will find any non-Sybil criterion you use to enforce rate limits and work around it. "Enforce rate limits per User-Agent?" I'm now 10,000 different applications. "Enforce rate limits per IP address?" I'm now 10,000 different compromised residential IP addresses. At some point, distinguishing between well-behaved, buggy-but-legitimate, and outright malicious automated traffic is either impossible or too time-consuming. Upon which point you throw up your hands and say, "Screw it, everyone but Google or a browser is banned."