Big, Beautiful AI

Written by Brook Schaaf

President Calvin Coolidge said, “If you see ten troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you.” Such was the case with the so-named Big, Beautiful Bill’s ten-year AI moratorium, which was stripped out yesterday in a wee-hours Senate vote by 99-1.

The moratorium would have potentially prohibited states from regulating AI scraping and data usage, worsening the position of content creators, among other outcomes. This debate was distilled on the most recent All-In podcast. Administration AI Czar David Sacks contended that AI works are transformative and that patchwork, state-selective laws will leave America behind in the race with China, whereas Jason Calacanis argued for creator equity through licensing—a classic greatness vs. fairness argument. 

Regarding affiliate, AI is accelerating Zero Clicks. As Marshall Nyman of NYMO & Co. pointed out, answer engines scrape coupon sites, which means no commission for the affiliate and, at best, distorted attribution for the merchant. The end of this road is already in sight… merchants will provide fewer coupons and affiliates will stop publishing to the open web, reducing opportunities to win new customers and sell to existing ones. This will be a victory for you-know-who.

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince commented a week and a half ago: “10 years ago, for every two pages they [Google] scraped, they sent you one visitor… now for every eighteen pages Google takes from you, you get one visitor… OpenAI… fifteen hundred to one… Anthropic… 60,000 to one… people aren’t following the footnotes.” He follows up with a sober admonition: “If you don’t fix this, the internet’s gonna die.”

His answer? Restrict content to create scarcity. “We have to design this in such a way that we share in the upside as that goes forward.” Right on cue, Cloudflare yesterday announced pay-per-crawl, which utilizes a (previously unknown to me) 402 Payment Required response with pricing. No payment or other agreement? The publisher has little to lose. While not an affiliate solution, it will put affiliates in a good position to monetize their valuable, ever-changing content. TollBit has a similar solution.

This approach may sound self-serving, coming as it is from the CEO of Cloudflare, but perhaps we should think of it differently—as selective serving, as not AI-serving, and as a way to keep the open web alive and thriving.

While Coolidge’s statement is calming and probably true, there are more than ten AI-related troubles coming down the road, some having already arrived. Publishers have to be ready. Even better, perhaps they can send their own troubles back the other way.