Authored by Dr R P via The Daily Sceptic,

Never mind Fancy Bear, or the NSO Group, the biggest threat to the open internet today is from the Big Tech corporations on which it has come to depend. For what else are we to conclude given that Google appears to be working on a system to lock large parts of the internet behind a new form of CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) designed not to tell apart humans from bots, but instead to make an un-person of anyone who doesn't own an 'approved' Android or Apple device.

Google's reCAPTCHA service is used by a wide variety of websites, many of them independent of Google in every other regard, to limit incoming traffic or data entered into contact forms. It is intended to prevent automated software from accessing these resources and using them to send spam messages or flood websites with denial of service attacks. You have probably encountered it when told to identify all the bicycles in a grid of images.