Setting up the strawman of writing "by hand" only to attack it as being ableist is facile and asinine. Nobody is arguing that Hawking, or anyone else who uses dictation or other assistive technologies to capture writing, aren't writing.
The fact that the network concentrator co uses DoD v4 address space to avoid conflicts implies that their clients are bringing v4 addresses, so IPv6 is utterly irrelevant in this situation.
I'm surprised Comcast or some other ISP doesn't step in with a claim of tortious interference. Reselling or granting access to the ISPs services like this is almost always against the ISPs terms of service.
The consumer is in no place to consent to this exchange.
While it can overheat and become problematic if taken to extremes, I've become convinced that this kind of tension is healthy in the prioritization process, and that you need a healthy equilibrium between engineering and product/management concerns.
Thinking about the possibility that there are orgs which sidestep this and still succeed is interesting.
Though, scrapers can certainly steal capacity through conversion for their own use. When they do so, they permanently deprive the site owner and other users the beneficial use of that capacity at that time.
I'm speaking morally, not legally. Though, in the US at least, there are parallels with free newspapers. You're allowed to take one for free. It's not legal to clear the whole rack.
When people here are saying "credit cards" are we talking about purely domestic networks, or what?
Visa and Mastercard payment rails are somewhat disjoint, even for large Indian companies. As a foreigner, there's always been a huge acceptance gap vs many other countries when you want to use a card.
Funny story: I used to work for a startup which had a trademark on "Airdrop". When Apple announced that feature, it took everyone there by surprise. Ended up reaching out and selling it to them for a buck or two in favor of maintaining goodwill.
Can only speak to my experience here in Washington, but 40 years ago you still needed to go to the reservation for the fun stuff. Even basic small firecrackers were outlawed in my county.