Who wants to own this position while Google moves on from it ?
In Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind,Al Ries and Jack Trout said, “Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the mind of the prospect.” So consider what’s happening in the minds of everyone who has long depended on Google to be what it has always been—a search engine for the Web—when they consider what they’re seeing from Google now, and reading in stories such as these:
By forking itself away from search, Google is also forking over the Web—and creating a giant opening for somebody else to grab the Web Search position.
Who would that be?
Microsoft’s Bing is one candidate, but Bing’s UI is a NASCAR of promotional jive. (See what Steve Jobs says about Microsoft here. Cuts like a scalpel.)
DuckDuckGo is the other. Its position is privacy. That’s good, but Web Search is better now, because the position is available. Google isn’t abandoning search, but now they’d rather be “your helpful assistant” and “personal shopper” than the Web’s “librarian.” (Source: Google Gemini.) To make that shift, Google has compromised Web search, and the Web with it.)
Conveniently, DuckDuckGo already has a search engine for the Web. They can sharpen that position while keeping—or even expanding —their privacy one. And help save the Web in the process.
None of those stories name the persons laid off, which is what readers will most want to know. Yes, I can see why. But stories need characters.
A plan to enclose the public Web
The Web is a public commons made of links. There is stuff at those links, almost all of it open to everybody, by design.
The main way we see and use that stuff is with a browser. But what if your browser has AI of its own, and that AI stands between you and what's at those links? Your Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or DuckDuckGo browser won't just fetch and display pages. It will interpret, summarize, filter, and answer, using whatever AI its maker chooses to provide. And those AIs, even if they operate locally rather than in distant data centers, still come from silo'd vendors.
Think about what happens when browsers become AI intermediaries rather than ways to access sources directly. Imagine Chrome relying on Gemini, Firefox on Claude, Safari on Apple Intelligence, and DuckDuckGo on ChatGPT.
In that world, your browser becomes an interpreter of the Web rather than a way to navigate it. What was once primarily a world of links increasingly becomes inventory for competing AI systems. The Web remains underneath, but no longer as a place through which you browse and surf from source to source. Instead, it becomes a substrate from which AI systems gather, summarize, and present information.
If that happens, it's a form of enclosure. The commons will still exist, but access to it will be mediated by private systems operated by a handful of vendors. That's the danger here.
Being old, I get lots of ads for Chair Tai Chi, Chair Yoga, and other positional challenges toward staying alive, limber, and not much closer to dead than you are without them.
So this one occurred to me yesterday. And, since I can no longer draw (arthritis, talent), I handed illustration over to ChatGPT.
As Q&A with AI chatbots replaces search, the Web is starting to look run-down, and in some ways is being abandoned. If that continues, what happens to the Web’s architects, authors, and institutions? What we do to save the Web—and them? Read on for an answer.
Big AI subverts everything, including hyperlinks, which are what make the Web a web.
With Big AI, you no longer surf from searches to sources across an ocean of links. You ask questions and get answers from the world’s largest Magic 8-Balls. They top the new hierarchy, which subverts and subordinates the Web.
Go to any of the Big AI chatbots—ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Meta, whatever—and ask a question. If it pauses for a moment, there’s a good chance it’ll say “Searching the Web.”
But it’s not. It’s composing an answer synthesized from what it has harvested from the Web, plus a vast amount of other forms of ingested human expression. It may or may not point back to sources on the Web. And if it does, it’s only providing footnotes.
Pew reports that people reading AI summaries of Google searches click on links only about 8% of the time. When search results come without an AI summary, that number is 15%. But both numbers are down from 100%, back when links were all that search engines produced. As a result of that change, publishers report losses of 20-90% in traffic and revenue in the past year alone. Many small publishers are now gone.
And what about the services and institutions that kept the Web both ours and durable (such as those with logos in the windows of the abandoned house image above)? Keep that question in mind while I ask Google’s new AI Mode to compare itself, side-by-side, to Google Search:
The stuff in the Google Search column is being steadily deprecated by what’s happening in the Google AI Mode column. Gemini explained that to me in January, when I interviewed it for Where Are We? That post begins,
While the Web isn’t a place, we know it as one. The language we use to describe it is concrete and structural: domains at locations, with sites that are built and have pages that are authored, and contents that are uploaded and downloaded.
For a generation or more, we have searched through the Web’s vast and structured library using Google, whose original mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” When we searched Google, we relied on its PageRank system to bring us lists of pages ranked by the number and quality of inbound link sources, and how likely a given site was to contain keywords, text strings, and other search terms.
That’s now gone. Old pages are missing from many searches. AI guesswork is replacing formerly normal search results. The look of Web structure in search results is just emulation.
This change matters a lot to me. I’ve been writing and publishing on the Web for thirty-one years, and almost all my work is still out there on solid static sites. And now Google fails to find many of those pages, despite having been on the Web for decades and having lots of inbound links. My friend Dave Askins tells me the same malady afflicts much of his own archival work: it’s present on the Web, but absent from Google searches. Why?
I asked Google’s Gemini that question. Here’s what it said:
The “disappearing” of the old web is a result of a massive shift in Google’s priorities over the last few years.
While you might be looking for a specific historical document or an old forum thread, Google’s systems are now aggressively tuned to filter out what they consider “stale” or “unhelpful” content…
In the race to be a ‘helpful assistant,’ Google has stopped being a ‘universal library.
PageRank is still there, it tells me, but subordinated. To what?
Of course: advertising.
Taking my clues from Keyords are dead, by Shalom Gonzalez in Search Engine Land, I asked Gemini to tell me “how searches by the helpful assistant might constantly be looking for what the person might eventually want to buy, so they can be advertised at when the right time comes.”
Gemini replied,
This is the “secret sauce” of the 2026 search model. If the old search engine was a librarian, the new one is a personal shopper who is taking notes on everything you do to predict your next “need state. The transition you’re sensing is the move from Reactive Search (answering what you asked) to Predictive Search (answering what you’re going to ask).”
This fucks the Web.
And you too. You are no longer the reader, the researcher. Google thinks what you want from the Web’s library no longer matters. Nor does the library itself. Google search is now guesswork based on what its AI thinks really matters, plus what it thinks you might want to buy. These assumptions are based on what Eli Pariser, in The Filter Bubble, calls “a bad theory of you.” Only worse, because it’s now also a bad theory of the Web. Here’s Gemini again:
While you might be looking for a specific historical document or an old forum thread, Google’s systems are now aggressively tuned to filter out what they consider “stale” or “unhelpful” content. Here is why those old archives are vanishing from your search results
OMFG.
Sixty-five years ago, The Twilight Zone aired an episode about what’s happening here. It was called “To Serve Man” and ended this way:
Everybody in the surveillance-fed advertising fecosystem already regards personal privacy as a bug, not a feature. With Big AI, the plan is to modernize that fecosystem by moving human cattle onto corporate ranches, where they can be observed more closely than ever, and advertised at with far more accuracy. This, the thinking goes, should multiply the size of the $1 trillion advertising business.
Here is how Meta tempts me to move onto its private AI ranch. Unlike my friends there, I’m not going. (Though I am on Facebook, for other—yes, morally compromised—reasons. That’s where this ad showed up, when I had just closed a creepy Meta-generated AI “reel.”)
Screenshot
For a look at how the new AI-expanded fecosystem works, see—
We find that 17 of 20 chatbots share information with at least one third party. Three chatbots share plaintext conversation text, including both prompt and response snippets, with Microsoft Clarity through session replay. Fifteen chatbots share conversation URLs or chat identifiers with third-party advertising, analytics, or social endpoints. Several chatbots expose user identity through support widgets, analytics, advertising, and session replay tags; in some cases, hashed emails are shared.
This is exactly how things already work for most websites (run a PageXray on any site or page to see a visualization of personal data flows that looks much like the one above). The difference is that websites at least throw a cookie notice in your path, either to force consent to being tracked or to prompt you to click on “choices” that might stop some tracking. (Which, mostly, they don’t. You get tracked anyway.) With Big AI, all this tracking is already permitted by oxymoronic “privacy” policies you’ve don’t read.
It said there are two ways. One is by replacing empty corporate promises with privacy contracts that people proffer, and sites and services agree to. The other is by building on genuine trust with scalable ways for customers and companies to do business and communicate with each other. Many more of those ways can be imagined when customers have full agency rather than what little they get as human cattle on corporate ranches.
We now have a standard on which an intention economy can be based: IEEE 7012-2025, nicknamed MyTerms.
Our (Customer Commons, MyData Global, and the MyTerms Alliance) goal is to bridge the gap between the 7012-2025 standard and real-world adoption. The Industry Connections activity can help define and pilot practical training, develop strategic road maps, identify and implement certification programs, and document an industry white paper advancing standard awareness and understanding.
The motivation is simple: the standard has major implications across industries and consumers. We need a robust, yet agile framework for a rapid market introduction, iterated with expert feedback, ensuring broad stakeholder buy-in.
You can join by filling out this form, and by encouraging others to do the same, starting with the services and institutions in the top image above.
We believe we have identified the largest actionable total addressable market (“TAM”) in human history. We estimate that our quantifiable TAM is $28.5 trillion, consisting of $370 billion in Space from space-enabled solutions; $1.6 trillion in Connectivity across $870 billion in Starlink Broadband and $740 billion in Starlink Mobile as well as additional opportunities in enterprise and government; $26.5 trillion in AI across $2.4 trillion in AI infrastructure, $760 billion in consumer subscriptions, $600 billion in digital advertising, and $22.7 trillion in enterprise applications.
Shot this from the Wharf in Santa Barbara as the Sun was about to sink below 4,028-foot Broadcast Peak and the Santa Ynez Mountains. There wasn’t a cloud in he sky. Also, this shot is stopped way down. You can do that on an iPhone 16. Nice feature.
Whether report
The Sun is behind clouds here in Santa Barbara, but I still have faith that it’ll be clear by late afternoon, which is how things go here. Meanwhile, Bloomington has had lots of rain while I’ve been gone. Monroe Lake is moving toward flood stage, with 1,605 cfs (cubic feet per second) flowing in. (I just noticed that the photo of the lake in Wikipedia is one I shot from a plane in 2019. That kind of thing happens a lot, because I’ve permissively licensed dozens of thousands of published photos, and many of those have found their way into Wikimedia Commons, the staging site for photos Wikipedia might use.) Also, the nearby Santa Rosa Island Fireappears to be out.
As happened yesterday, something I wrote here in Wordland got too long, so I made it a separate post, titled So maybe it’s not too late to teach it to myself. German, that is. I still have the book I failed to versteh in 1962, so why not?
And all of them need all of our help from all of us
Dentsu says the whole advertising business, for which the most personalized kind is the most ideal, and by design depends on surveillance, will pass $1 trillion this year. This is what ProjectVRM has been up against since 2006, Customer Commons since 2013, and MyTermssince January.
But it won't work on malaria
Wired says you can stop a mosquito bite from itching by applying cold or heat.
I'm back to unsubscribing (or not subscribing in the first place) to newsletters that require subscriptions to read whole posts. Apologies if yours is one of them. I can't subscribe to everything. There has to be a better way to monetize newsletters.
Everything in the piece is excellent. The writing is vivid and clear. Its case is well-made. My only problem with it was suspecting it was written in some way by an AI. The tell:
short sentences
one-line paragraphs, often in lists
contrasty (“not this, but that”) phrasing
clever subheads (and/or clever everything)
outline-like logical organization
So I had originality.ai examine it. The result: “We are 62% confident that the text scanned is AI-generated, NOT to be interpreted as 62% of the text produced is AI-generated.”
However, even if a piece is AI-generated, does it matter if it’s exactly what the author is trying to say?
Let’s stop pretending. Everyone on Substack is using AI. If you think they aren’t, you’re high. I know because I am (using AI, not high), and I’ve been doing it for a while.
My process isn’t complicated. I sit down and write about a page, maybe 450 words. It’s not elegant. It’s not structured. It’s basically a brain dump. Half sentences, ideas that don’t quite connect yet, things I’d say out loud but that look ridiculous when you see them on the screen. It’s intellectual vomiting. A rough sketch of what I’m trying to say.
Then I paste it into AI and say something like, “Hey, give me an essay.”
And it does.
Three things about that:
This makes me think less of Dr. Barkhuff. Sorry, can’t help it.
Knowing he writes that way colors everything he’s written on his blog since I read that—and I read everything he writes, because his brain dump is the opposite of shit.*
Not everyone on Substack uses AI. (I’m on Substack a bit, and I don’t write with AI.)
Now dig this: The author of the Hackernoon piece, Bogomil Shopov – Бого, aka @bogomil, is writing to be read in thirteen different languages. Does what he writes sound like AI in Bulgarian to begin with?
Hell, I dunno. But why not use AI to write something in your native language when you also know it will be translated into another twelve? (Is AI-style writing better for translation? Betcha it is.)
It should be clear by now that there is a learning loop that starts with all of us, then moves through all the AIs that harvest and process our utterings, and is then fed back to us in an idealized style that makes us (or at least me) reflect on ourselves and our own styles, while knowing that we too are being hacked by AIs and not just by other humans: co-evolution at work.
By the way, I just ran the blog post you’re readig through Originality.ai to see if it sounds like AI. It said,
Likely Original 99% Confidence.
It also said I have only three scans left before I have to upgrade, which I probably won’t.
*I asked ChatGPT what “the opposite of shit” might be. I got, of course, a long-winded answer that boiled down to one word: gold. I can see the case, but it’s wrong, and I wouldn’t use it, except here, as a case in point.
I just wasted an hour of writing and research by hitting the wrong chord on my keyboard here, after neglecting to save my work in progress. You can't teach an old dog old mistakes.
There is no contrast between the US, China, and the EU more stark than AI regulation. Here in the US there is effectively none (especially after yesterday's news). In China there is the usual state control, but with a strong AI development imperative. The EU has the AI Act, which I was briefed on yesterday during an online session with the Berkman Klein Center (which is covering the AI thing well). What I see with the AI Act is very little drag on innovation and implementation of AI, but the simple fact that AI regulation exists in the EU has the AI giants (all based in the US) pumping the brakes there. To me the main difference between the three regions is that only one of them cares about personal (or any kind of) privacy, and backs that care with policy.
Uncle Josh is my favorite Mike Cross song, especially now that I have the life expectancy of a puppy. Alas, the lyrics are nowhere on the Web. Should I put them there? They matter. Mike will be 80 this year and hasn't been active for a long time. His agency still has a page for him, if you run a search. His old URL, mikecross.com, redirects to the agency, but you can find what it used to be at archive.org. Here's one snapshot, with a popover explaining his absence. But listen to the song.
A MODIS satellite view of NASA FIRMS (Fire Information for Resource Management System) view of the Santa Rosa Island and Simi Valley fires on California’s South Coast. Click on it for the full view.
Following fires
In normal times, Santa Rosa Island is easy to watch from our deck in Santa Barbara. But right now it’s burning up, and smoke from that fire and the Sandy Fire in Simi Valley have added layers of brown to the gray marine haze that comes and goes. So here are some sources of visuals in addition to those the links above:
Most of those are interactive and good for following developments anywhere on Earth.
Talk me out of it. Or into something else.
I need a mic for doing podcasts and similar audio work here in my Santa Barbara office. Thing is, I’m here much less than I’m in Bloomington, which is kitted out. All I really need is a mic that’s not too expensive. Currently leaning toward the Shure M7VX.
As to so many other doomed things
At our New Jersey home in the 50s and 60s, my parents expressed a relatively cosmopolitan level of taste by drinking Savarin Coffee, brewed in a percolator. The brand is long gone now, but it’s interesting to see what happened to it.
Iain Henderson, talking MyTerms at IIW last month. Look for him at #CPDP2026.
CPDP stands for Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection. The theme of this year’s CPDP is “Competing Visions Shared Futures.” The MyTerms future is replacing consent with contract in our online dealings with websites and digital services.
Consent is what cookie notices speciously obtain from your clicks on the forced choices that interrupt your first experience with nearly every website—and do nothing to protect your privacy or data. With MyTerms, sites and services agree to your privacy terms, rather than you to theirs. And your privacy agreements are backed by contract law, not by empty corporate promises, which always lack ways for you to monitor compliance. With MyTerms, you can do that.
Attending #CPDP2026?
🤔 Looking forward to paradigm shifting at last towards the individual in personal privacy?
👍 Let’s talk about MyTerms, the first machine readable standard for personal privacy, IEEE 7012
3 options:
1️⃣ Attend our CPDP workshop on Friday 22 May 14:15 – 15:30
2️⃣ Reach out here to the MyData Global#MyTerms champion Iain Henderson, who will be on the conference all 3 days
3️⃣ Reach out to me in DM giving me your contact details, and I’ll pass them on to Iain. I will myself be on site Friday.
😄 Looking forward to building paradigm shifting solution with you!
If you’re at CPDP, find and talk to Iain. This will be easiest on Friday, when he will be giving the workshop linked above and now here in the Music Room on Friday from 14:15 – 15:30. Absent that, read what he’s been writing here, I’ve been writing here, and Nitin Badjatia has been writing here.
I love basketball. I love watching it, and in my youth (columns A and B above, row 2), I loved playing it.
I wasn’t good. My only skill was shooting the ball, which I did flat-footed from the nether regions of the court called “outside” or “downtown.” I hit about half of those shots if nobody guarded me, which was most of the time, because I was a slow white guy who stood 5′ 9 1/2 inches on a tall day, with “alligator arms” that were two inches less than that. But I did have that shot, so when sides were chosen for pickup games, I’d be in the middle of the pack, which was good enough for me.
Playing at that low level still conditioned me to maintain a steady interest in how the game was played. This went through my years in North Carolina (’65 to ’85, with a break for New Jersey from ’69 to ’74), the Bay Area (’85 to ’01), Santa Barbara (’01 to now), Boston (’06 to ’13), New York (’13 to ’25) and Indiana (’21 to now). I went to countless Duke, Knicks, and Warriors games, plus the occasional Lakers, Harvard, Celtics, and Hoosiers games. I’ve watched a lot of games on TV, of course. (Caught the Pistons being creamed by the Cavs last night.) And I listen to half a dozen basketball podcasts in addition to the many hoops channels on SiriusXM.
So I got to thinking this morning about how much the five positions in the game have changed, both in how they are played and what they are called. Guards, forwards and centers have turned into points, shooters, wings, bigs, and numbers, among other labels. So, with artistic help from ChatGPT, I created the chart above. It’s my own thinking at a moment in time, and subject to improvement and debate. So let’s have both. A pickup game. Fun exercise with no losers.
Last Thursday's post, titled Person Networks, was occasioned by outreach by a friend who urged me by email to join Intelligence.com, a slick new-ish thing with LinkedIn-like ambitions on the surface and various nefarities underneath. Since then, others in my real-life circle of friends have received the same invitation.
Turns out the invitations were not made with the permission of the putative source. Talk about dumb: the friend in question—the one who did not send the invite—is one of the world's top cybersecurity experts. He complained loudly to the company, which said it would stop. Meanwhile, their excuse to him for creating these fake emails was basically, "Even LinkedIn does it." The expert is wisely not on LinkedIn. Or on Intelligence.com, we presume.
The first version of this post became Snucked and sucked, but never mind that. I'm also packing to fly early tomorrow, so for now I'm just blabbing an annoted link pile during what's left of today. In other words, sort of like the usual but without subheads.
I didn't know we were in an Axial Age (it's a thing) until I read We May Be Entering A Second Axial Age, in Noēma. The subhead lays it out: "The transition from small hunter-gatherer societies into complex civilizations gave rise to the first Axial Age. Today, the planetary polycrisis of climate chaos, mass migration, increasing warfare and transformative AI represents a rupture of comparable magnitude." I agree with the headline, kinda, but not with much after that. But it's a good read. Makes ya think.
CJ Shivers in SeO What?—"A new algo dropped from Google and it appears to have the world of SEO in a tizzy…There are a few notable new challenges that have arisen with this update, in combination with industry deals, that should have bloggers and newsletter publishers more concerned than usual." He has suggestions. I'm exploring some.
If you want stories that aren't from the amen corners of the left and the right, Reason is useful. Examples:
While I avoid politics, I am interested in why Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire are said to be tanking. So I listened to Taylor Lorenz's podcast interview with Will Sommer. It's a good unpacking of the whole right-wing talker scene; but I was amazed that Taylor said of George Will "I don't know who that is," when she and will had both been columnists at the same time for the Washington Post. (She for two years, Will since the Pleistocene.)
I shot this at DEN five days before a Frontier plane at the same airport ingested a trespasser during takeoff on Runway 17L, aborting the flight and causing news.
Emergency crews responded to the scene and bussed passengers to the terminal. 231 souls were on board. Emergency response and investigation are ongoing. The NTSB has been notified. Runway 17L will remain closed while the investigation is conducted. 2/2.
The story continues with this:
The Airbus A321 had begun accelerating down the runway for takeoff when the pilots reported to air traffic controllers that they’d hit someone, officials said. The pilots aborted takeoff as smoke began filling the cabin, and passengers evacuated the plane via slides, Frontier Airlines said in a statement to USA TODAY. The identity of the pedestrian was not immediately released.
PYOK stands for Paddle Your Own Kangaroo, and is at paddleyourownkanoo.com. Its About page is, like everything else at the domain, by Mateusz Masczcynski. (Took a few tries to write that correctly from memory. Need to keep stretching those neurons.) There is only one of him, but he occasionally writes in the plural:
It all started back in 2017 when I managed to achieve my dream yet again. The same dream as yours; to become a flight attendant.
We devote huge amounts of time, effort and money to achieve this dream. The world of cabin crew recruitment is tough and ultra-competitive. Getting through this ruthless process can sometimes seem like an impossible task.
That’s certainly what I felt when I was knocked back time after time by airline recruiters. I didn’t know what I was doing wrong but I was determined to learn from my mistakes. paddleyourownkanoo.com was borne out the information and knowledge I gained in achieving my dream. This works – I’ve been invited to numerous cabin crew Assessment Days and I’ve been offered jobs from a number of major international airlines.
Today, I continue to send applications and attend Assessment Day’s. My mission – to help you through the process. There’s no secret, checklist formula or 100% guaranteed promise. But I hope that what you read here will prepare you for your journey.
Cabin crew recruitment is never going to be easy but I hope the PYOK website helps you on your journey!
And that’s not his only thing. There’s also Crew Insider (“the airline industry explained”), Cabin Crew Forum (“Demystifying the ultra competitive world of cabin crew recruitment”), Points and Miles, Offers, accounts on Facebookand Xitter, and a newsletter. I just followed and subscribed to all of them.
This is the first of two Internet Identity Workshops last year. The First Person Network, below, was one of many projects in the works there.
I’ve been invited by a friend to join Intelligence.com, which “helps you reach the right people, through those who know you best. It’s simple, thoughtful, and built on trust, just like the best introductions.” The inveterate among us will recall that this is what LinkedIn tried to do in the first place, before it turned into 1.2 billion business cards and 19 corporate acquisitions in a blender.
The first two say nothing about who they are. The third goes to collectivei.com, where the heading (across most of the visible page) says “AI that studies how the world does business.” Click on the Company link in the menu on the left (in the computer screen view), and (below several pages of downward scrolls) you’ll find the Leadership Team’s six heavy-hitting members above a star chamber of advisors.
Below that is a crawl of Webby Awards, and this:
Build what’s next, with the team that’s already ahead.
Whether you’re a sales leader looking for better outcomes, a partner wanting to deliver transformation, or a developer interested in embedded intelligence, there’s a place for you in the Collective[i] ecosystem.
So clearly, Intelligence.com is less for you and me than for our large corporate employers. IMHO. Feel free to convince me otherwise. I’m open.
The First Person Network is not another Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter/X. **It is not a social network; it is not centralized; and it does not belong to any company. **In the same way the Internet allows any device to connect with any other device, the First Person Network lets any member connect with any other member. Directly. Privately. Personally. With no intermediaries. No platform. No surveillance. No advertising. The First Person Network is about trust. It is a trust network that exists only in the individual digital wallets of all the members—the way many of us keep our own address books on our own smartphones today. Building this trust network as a global digital utility is the goal of the First Person Project. We’ll have much more to share as the initiative grows.
For the first time ever, a call to AppleCare got me an AI agent rather than a human being. The agent solved my problem, but made me feel sad, because AppleCare’s people provided a human connection, just we get from the people behind the Apple Stores’ Genius Bars. Are they the next to go?
Works in progress
The RSL (really simple licensing) standard is out there. In this section, it says,
Really Simple Licensing (RSL) is an evolution of the early ideas behind the widely adopted RSS standard, which provided a machine-readable framework for publishers to syndicate content to third-party clients and crawlers in exchange for traffic.
The RSL standard extends and generalizes these concepts to include explicit licensing terms, enabling publishers to define machine-readable compensation and usage conditions for crawling and processing their content. The RSL Technical Steering Committee leads the evolution of RSL in collaboration with internet publishers, technology companies, industry associations, and other stakeholders.
One problem with the RSS comparison is that RSL is not simple. Here’s the 1.0 draft of the standard. Copied into Microsoft Word, it weighs in at 16,928 words. Compare that to the RSS 2.0 spec at Harvard Law (where it has lived as a finished thing, since 2003).
It also creates yet another namespace: a consent ID.
Clearly, it comes from the entertainment industry (see RSL Media), and works to solve a serious problem: massive unpermitted harvesting and repurposing of copyrighted works for AI training and commercial re-use purposes by parties other than the rightsholders. If RSL succeeds, it will join Creative Commons and MyTerms as tools in the private rights protection box.
So why have the AI bigs shut down their ethics teams?
Building that trust pays off: companies investing in AI ethics reported 22% improvement in customer satisfaction and retention, 20% better incident prevention and 19% higher AI adoption rates. A majority (59%) of executives say their ethics efforts delivered results.
