In fact, it points to how AI might change how the commercial web works.
Blocking the Applebot from your own websiteis easy.
You just add a couple of lines of text to a file on your server.
New York Times building.Rafael Hoyos Weht / Unsplash
But most of our data is not on websites we own and control.
It’s in Dropbox, on social media sites like Instagram, or internet forums like Reddit.
Plus, if you opt-out, does this mean Apple will retroactively remove it from its already-trained models?
Some money.Emilio Takas / Unsplash
Withholding their data is, in these cases, a bargaining tactic.
This is a very interesting twist for the web as a whole.
Now, though, Big Tech companies seem willing to pay to scrape.
A clumsy metaphor for the future of news.Zachary Keimig / Unsplash
Consequences
This is already having consequences across the web.
This will, of course, lead to a compartmentalized pay-to-play web.
Googledoesn’t even bother to index many of the smaller siteson the web anymore.
And if only licensed scrapers can operate, other more legitimate uses are also out the window.
The fight is on, and we’re already familiar with the likely result.
Imagine that, only for the entire web.
And this is going to hurt the publishers, too.
