To keep AI from ruining the internet, we should treat bots like "wild animals" and charge them "rent" for using our digital spaces.
March 18, 2026
Original Paper
Virtual Critter Husbandry: Zoning and Stewardship in Cyberspace
SSRN · 6341987
The Takeaway
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.
From the abstract
<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