How to stop AI from eating the open Internet

What exactly are the rules around data scraping? It turns out that there aren’t many—in part because government regulators haven’t really focused on this increasingly important issue. Internet data is now becoming a crucial resource in the AI boom, and there are ongoing clashes between major tech platforms that are trying to both hoard and capitalize on that data. Caught in the crossfire are advocates for an open internet, and small-time content creators who want to get compensation for their work. It’s a thorny dilemma: The internet was built on a communal ethos of free-flowing information, but that has also allowed AI companies to hoover up content for free, and make immense profits from it. Legally speaking, they’re largely doing it in a void. Federal law only loosely touches on data scraping, and courts have been slow to develop a body of law around the field. Instead, the industry mostly follows a set of customs and voluntary standards.