The bigger question that noone's asking is the cost to generate the page: Does it take them 1 second of CPU time to generate the page? * If not, isn't that a

The bigger question that noone's asking is the cost to generate the page: Does it take them 1 second of CPU time to generate the page? * If not, isn't that a disproportionate amount of time for the client to do some silly throw-away work?! * If yes, why don't they improve their infrastructure such that static pages could be properly cached as they should be, and a slightly stale versions could be served to everyone at a lower total cost than if you require even a few select users with "abnormal" parameters to solve the captchas? At the end of the day, all these DDoS protections are placed in front of pages that by all accounts should be cacheable static pages, which should take less time to produce and consume than the repeated 5-second JavaScript captchas that they replace these static pages with. The underlying issue is that one solution could be sold as a standalone one-size-fits-all product, but the other one can not, so, that's why we have to face daily disappointment if our browsing setup is "abnormal" in any way.