AI's Free Web Scraping Days May Be Over, Thanks To This New Licensing Protocol
ZDNet, Wednesday, September 10th, 2025
The internet's new standard, RSL, is a clever fix for a complex problem, and it just might give human creators a fighting chance in the AI economy.
- Media companies announced a new web protocol: RSL.
- RSL aims to put publishers back in the driver's seat.
- The RSL Collective will attempt to set pricing for content.
AI companies are capturing as much content as possible from websites while also extracting information. Now, several heavyweight publishers and tech companies -- Reddit, Yahoo, People, O'Reilly Media, Medium, and Ziff Davis (ZDNET's parent company) -- have developed a response: the Really Simple Licensing (RSL) standard.