Veto S9934: The NY Stealth Crawler Protection Act Threatens the Open Web

Veto S9934, the NY Stealth Crawler Protection Act. This bill doesn't target AI harms — it hands publishers a legal weapon to silence journalists, researchers, and security professionals doing legitimate public-interest work. Anonymous crawling is how The Markup exposed Amazon's anti-competitive product rankings and how ProPublica revealed Amazon steering shoppers toward overpriced items. EFF's own Privacy Badger crawls sites anonymously to protect user privacy. These tools only work because they're anonymous — Facebook already demonstrated what happens when researchers identify themselves, shutting down accounts and demanding published findings be retracted. S9934 would let any news website obtain a court order unmasking a crawler with zero evidence of wrongdoing. That's not accountability; it's a veto over lawful public access. The actual problem driving this legislation is overaggressive crawling that strains servers — and anonymity has nothing to do with that. Technical solutions can address server load without dismantling the open web. Sign this bill and New York sets a precedent that other states and Congress will follow, chilling beneficial crawling nationwide. Please veto S9934.