A new web standard forces AI bots to pay up
Web giants like Reddit, Yahoo, and Medium just backed Really Simple Licensing (RSL), an open standard that lets site owners charge AI developers for scraping content. Built on robots.txt, the system allows publishers to set fees per crawl or per inference rather than just blocking bots outright. Why it matters: It attempts to give publishers collective leverage against Big Tech, though its success hinges entirely on AI companies playing by the rules.