The 4G daily was a different user who hosted a go module where he was the single user on his own server, this was not DeVault.

I'd be pretty pissed if I hosted a go module essentially for myself and suddenly I have a $200 dollar bill, because google decided to clone my repository 500 times a day. If it doesn't bother you, how about you donate $200 a month to a charity of my choosing, because it doesn't matter to you.

Self hosting costs money, for this one user it would seem the options of blocking or other options are more tenable

If money was a problem, I'd expect this individual to ha e rectified it on their end

So tell me why do people use DDoS protection? It's just money. If you run a server you should be able to eat all the cost!

Seriously do you follow through what your arguments actually mean if applied in general?

There was no actual DDoS, so no need to compare

Should every language be responsible for paying the bandwidth bills for dependencies?

You might look at the most recent comment from the Go team on the issue, there have been no additional requests or events since they last resolved it for both of the effected parties

Plenty of bootstrapped businesses have better things to spend $200 / month on, let alone the time spent trying to figure out where all the anomalous traffic is coming from. As I understand it, it's not simple file fetches either. It's cloning a repo, which involves two-way communication, consumes CPU and RAM, and causes disk seeks. You're not slapping it on CloudFront and calling it a day. Finally, it looks to me like the costs are going to scale the more people he has using sourcehut and writing Go modules.

I don't really understand turning this around on him. Why should he have to subsidize Google? If it's not a problem, why do we have robots.txt at all? Just let bots hammer your site and cope with it.

The current situation can't be the optimal solution. It wasn't even present prior to Go 1.16. Only one company has the ability to change that. What should he do differently here? Why should he have to spend any of his time or money working around an issue he didn't create?

That was a different user. The fact that a user not running a git hosting service is potentially eating $200 a month should queue you into the fact that the cost to Drew is likely drastically higher than that.

Google should be sending reimbursement checks for the damage done here on this issue.

Drew is running a code hosting business and this is a cost of providing a feature to the users. He can pass the costs on if it is a problem. He has lots of options and his competitors are not making a big deal out of this.

I suspect he's drawn his line in the sand and wants to keep it going rather than finding a solution that works without requiring upstream changes.

If I provide a paid service and someone abuses it I must deal with it because my larger competitors deal with it? It's good to know that small businesses have no place in the modern world.