They have the right to try to convince me to let them scrape me. Most of the time they're thinly veiled data traders. I haven't seen any new company try to scrape my stuff since maybe Kagi.

Kagi is welcome to scrape from their IP addresses. Other bots that behave are fine too (Huawei and various other Chinese bots don't and I've had to put an IP block on those).

So who decides that you can be one? Right now it's Cloudflare, a litteral monopoly...

The truth is that I sympathize with the people trying to use mobile connections to bypass such a cartel.

What Cloudflare is doing now is worse than the web crawlers themselves and the legality of blocking crawlers with a monopoly is dubious at best.

which is why they will stop claiming to be one.

so what happened to competition fostering a better outcome for all then?