Heh, exactly my other reply - I feel for you, friend!

Their download service does not require authentication, and they are kind enough to be hesitant about blocking IPs (one IP could be half of a university campus, for example). So that leaves chasing around to find an individual culprit and hoping they'll be nice and fix it.

Thanks for the reply - I did not mean to rant, but, unfortunately, this is in context of a B2B service, and the other side are most commonly IT teams of customers.

There are, of course, both very capable and professional people, and also kind people who are keen to react / learn, but we've also had situations where 429s result in complaints to their management how our API "doesn't work", "is unreliable" and then demanding refunds / threatening legal action etc...

One example was sending 1.3M update requests a day to manage state of ~60 entities, that have a total of 3 possible relevant state transitions - a humble expectation would be several requests/day to update batches of entities.

People like Geofabrik are why we can (sometimes) have nice things, and I'm very thankful for them.

Level of irresponsibility/cluelessness you can see from developers if you're hosting any kind of an API is astonishing, so downloads are not surprising at all...If someone, a couple of years back, told me things that I've now seen, I'd absolutely dismiss them as making stuff up and grossly exaggerating...

However, on the same token, it's sometimes really surprising how API developers rarely ever think in terms of multiples of things - it's very often just endpoints to do actions on single entities, even if nature of use-case is almost never on that level - so you have no other way than to send 700 requests to do "one action".

This "it's only right that we, the humble and fair politicians, are exempt from this forceful control we're exerting over everyone" aspect of ChatControl is beyond ridiculous.

I'm not usually of a "revolutionist" kind in the slightest, but, when you combine this small example to a lot of things currently happening across Europe and the US - it does increasingly seem like people in power are less and less wary of heavy and serious responsibility their positions hold to the people, and are more and more brazen when it comes to trying to isolate themselves from scrutiny over their self-profiting endeavours.

Historically, there were somewhat regular "correction" events happening somewhere sufficiently close, that made sure that responsibility is stuck in politician's minds for longer into the future, but it's been a long time since.

Edit: My comment is partially fueled by everything that's currently happening in Serbia (grand-scale systemic corruption), but I do think you can see similar movement in much more orderly countries in Europe as well, and all this is unconnected to ChatControl, but I see it as a small ripple from the same source.

I also dare say that current state of affairs in US has emboldened such people everywhere.

Nepal is probably not felt as close enough to have an effect.