The battle over who controls online content – and who gets paid for it – is heating up. For years, AI companies have scraped the web to feed their models, often without permission or compensation. Publishers, meanwhile, have watched their work fuel billion-dollar technologies while struggling to protect their own revenues. Now, a new licensing framework called Really Simple Licensing (RSL) is stepping into that gap. Backed by platforms from Reddit to Yahoo, the standard aims to give publishers more control and force AI developers to pay for what they use.
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What is the RSL standard?
The Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard is an attempt to reshape how online content is accessed and used in the age of artificial intelligence. Inspired by the long-standing robots.txt protocol, which tells web crawlers which parts of a site they may or may not access, RSL goes much further. It lets publishers specify not only whether AI systems can crawl their sites, but also the terms under which that content can be used. Crucially, it introduces the possibility of licensing fees and royalties when AI models train on or generate outputs from a publisher’s material. In other words, it’s robots.txt with teeth, a protocol designed to create accountability and payment mechanisms where previously there were none.
At its core, RSL embeds licensing information directly into a site’s metadata, making the rules machine-readable. AI developers that want to crawl a site must check those instructions and abide by them, whether that means paying a subscription fee, agreeing to a pay-per-crawl model, or even paying per inference when content is used to generate an answer. The RSL Collective, a nonprofit body overseeing the standard, also envisions publishers banding together to negotiate terms more effectively, much like licensing groups in the music industry. Technical enforcement is expected to be aided by infrastructure providers such as Fastly, which can block or allow access depending on whether bots have properly identified themselves and agreed to the site’s licensing rules.
What it means for publishers
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The early support for RSL includes some of the internet’s biggest content platforms and publishers. Reddit, Yahoo, and Medium have signed on, along with Quora, wikiHow, O’Reilly Media, and Ziff Davis, which owns sites like CNET and Mashable. This backing is significant because it brings together a wide spectrum of content sources: user-generated forums, knowledge platforms, professional publishers, and digital media outlets. Their participation signals a recognition that without collective action, publishers risk seeing their work continue to fuel AI systems without compensation or consent.
For online publishers, the RSL standard represents both an opportunity and a safeguard. It offers the promise of new revenue streams by charging AI companies for access and use, something that could be especially valuable at a time when traditional digital advertising revenue is under strain. It also gives publishers more granular control, letting them decide under what circumstances their content can be used and setting boundaries around AI training and inference. At the same time, RSL provides smaller publishers with a way to stand alongside larger players by joining the Collective, reducing the need for one-on-one negotiations with powerful AI companies. The challenge, however, lies in enforcement: if AI developers simply ignore the standard, as some have done with robots.txt in the past, publishers will be forced to rely on legal and technical measures to defend their rights.
What it means for AI developers
For AI developers, the rise of RSL introduces both complexity and accountability. Where once the web could be treated as a nearly free and open dataset, now developers must contend with licensing terms that vary across sites. They may need to pay fees, report usage, and develop tools to ensure they are compliant with pay-per-inference models. This could make training large language models more expensive and technically challenging. On the other hand, it also provides a clearer framework for lawful and ethical use of data, reducing the risk of lawsuits or public backlash. If widely adopted, RSL could offer AI developers something they currently lack: a standard way to license data at scale.
Why it’s gaining traction
The timing of RSL’s emergence is no accident. Over the past year, lawsuits and public debates have mounted over whether AI companies are unfairly profiting from creative work they did not produce. Publishers and creators are increasingly demanding compensation, while regulators are beginning to scrutinize AI training practices. RSL arrives as both a practical technical solution and a political statement: it allows publishers to say, “You may use our content, but only on our terms.” The fact that major platforms like Reddit and Yahoo are backing it gives the standard legitimacy, and the involvement of infrastructure players like Fastly suggests a path toward real enforcement.
Whether RSL becomes a cornerstone of AI licensing or fades into the background will depend largely on adoption. If AI giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google choose to recognize and comply with the standard, it could reshape the economics of web data almost overnight. If they ignore it, RSL may struggle to gain traction without significant legal reinforcement. What is clear, however, is that the balance of power between AI companies and online publishers is shifting. For the first time, there is a unified technical standard designed to make AI companies pay for the content they rely on.
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Vyom Ramani
A journalist with a soft spot for tech, games, and things that go beep. While waiting for a delayed metro or rebooting his brain, you’ll find him solving Rubik’s Cubes, bingeing F1, or hunting for the next great snack. View Full Profile
