> Open is open.

I’d then ask OpenAI to be open too since open is open.

You're talking about a tragedy of the commons situation. There is an organic query rate of this based on the amount of public interest. Then there is the inorganic vacuuming of the entire dataset by someone who wants to exploit public services for private profit. There is zero reason why the public should socialize the cost of serving the excess capacity caused by private parties looking to profit from the public data.

I could have my mind changed if the public policy is that any public data ingested into an AI system makes that AI system permanently free to use at any degree of load. If a company thinks that they should be able to put any load they want on public services for free, they should be willing to provide public services at any load for free.

Rate limiting is a DDoS protection.

Pedantically: rate limiting is DoS prevention, not DDoS prevention. If you rate limit per IP, you're not mounting effective protection against a distributed attack. If you're rate limiting globally, you're taking your service offline for everyone.

The world is not black and white.