[Web-bot-auth] Re: Draft Agenda for Vienna

[Farzaneh Badiei <[e-mail]>]

Thank you.

I did not object to an "identfication" approach along with "identification
approach" to see how the work develops. But from the beginning I objected
to using the term "identification" for bots because I have seen how that
plays in governance systems and how it leads to discrimination and I also
suggested removing the term identification from the charter.
We don't have to identify to create trust.

With crawler best practices piece that will be presented, I am concerned
that we are telling crawlers to "identify" themselves which makes anonymous
bots irrelevant and it directly affects the AI-pref work because we are
coming up with a public interest paragraph to clarify sometimes following
robots.txt might not be compulsory.

These are the three clauses I have copied from the best pracices that will
be presented


   1.

   Crawlers must support and respect the Robots Exclusion Protocol.
   2.

   Crawlers must be easily identifiable through their user agent string.
   3.

   Crawlers must not interfere with the regular operation of a site.

Jo, Sara and I submitted an ID too in which we explained the practices
crawlers use to ensure they responisbly collect data. The question is does
that ID apply to anonymous bots and these best practices apply to the
identification approach?

Look forward to our discussion during the IETF.



On Sat, Jul 11, 2026 at 10:40 AM Rifaat Shekh-Yusef <[e-mail]>
wrote:

> All,
>
> The following link has the WebBotAuth WG draft agenda for Vienna:
> https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/agenda-126-webbotauth/
>
> Please, take a look and let us know what you think.
>
> Regards,
>  Rifaat & David
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