To keep AI from ruining the internet, we should treat bots like "wild animals" and charge them "rent" for using our digital spaces.
Rather than just blocking bots, this paper suggests we should 'zone' the internet like real-world land. It proposes charging AI companies 'extraction fees' similar to grazing rights to fund the digital commons they are depleting.
Virtual Critter Husbandry: Zoning and Stewardship in Cyberspace
SSRN · 6341987
<span>The contemporary web is increasingly shaped not only by human users but by non-human software agents—crawlers, scrapers, analytics systems, and AI training pipelines—that operate at scales no individual user can match. Existing mechanisms for governing these agents, such as robots.txt, CAPTCHAs, bot-management services, AI-specific licensing standards, and paid APIs, address specific problems but do not yet compose into a coherent framework for managing automated access to shared digital r