Walling Off the Open Internet to Stop AI May End Up Breaking Everything Else (www.techdirt.com)

The growing movement to restrict AI access to online content by imposing paywalls, crawl restrictions, and blocking scrapers risks undermining the foundational openness of the internet. While some advocates see locking down content as a way to curb AI companies’ unregulated use of data, this approach conflates broad bulk scraping with legitimate user-directed AI queries and threatens the free flow of information. Notably, Cloudflare's pay-per-crawl initiative and its allegations against Perplexity AI highlight a dangerous trend: treating all AI-driven access as unauthorized scraping, thereby threatening everyday uses like fact-checking, research, and content editing. This shift toward controlled, gatekeeper-led internet access not only risks entrenching power within a few large tech companies but also threatens essential public resources such as the Common Crawl archives, which have supported academic research and journalism for over a decade. Additionally, content blocking impacts not just AI training but also users relying on assistive technologies and alternative browsing tools. Companies like Reddit are even blocking archival access to monetize content licensing, further eroding the open web and historical record. The broader implication is a fragmented internet where sites that permit AI crawling gain visibility in emerging AI-mediated search ecosystems, while those that block AI become effectively invisible. As AI increasingly replaces traditional web search, being excluded from training datasets hinders discoverability and stifles innovation, making the trade-offs of restricting AI access far more consequential than many realize.