Who decides the rules of access on the internet? | Hacker News Reader

Who decides the rules of access on the internet?

peacprotocol.substack.com

1 pointjithinraj3 comments

Major web disputes like the Perplexity/Cloudflare clash over AI crawlers, OpenAI’s lawsuit with NYT, or Anthropic’s Claude facing publisher data concerns show that the “rules of access” for the web are more contested than ever.

Should these rules be set by individual publishers, infrastructure providers, AI companies, open standards, or by community consensus?

What would your ideal solution look like? Who should decide? What’s broken today?

Context:

• Perplexity: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/agents-or-bots-making-sen...

• Cloudflare: https://blog.cloudflare.com/perplexity-is-using-stealth-unde...

Yeah, so maybe interesting, but you might want to provide a bit more context/background on who is driving this, business model, and explain when you say "infrastructure", you're talking about content, not actual layer-<everything below application layer> infrastructure. Also "share ideas on X"? No thanks.

Thanks for the thoughtful feedback, fair points all around. Let me clarify:

Who’s driving this: PEAC is open-source (Apache 2.0), started by a small group of developers who care about web standards, but it’s meant to be community-stewarded from the start. No one “owns” it; anyone can contribute, pilot, or join the working group (GitHub or the form). The real goal is collective evolution.

Business model: There isn’t one. It’s pure OSS, free to use or adapt, no strings or monetization. Just focused on enabling fair consent and attribution for everyone.

On “infrastructure”: Good catch. I meant the application layer (CDNs like Cloudflare, content platforms), not lower networking layers. This is about access and content rules, extending things like robots.txt.

On "X”: X is just one option. GitHub issues, HN, email, or the working group form all work (links in repo/blog).

If you or anyone here has thoughts or critiques, I’d love to hear. How would you design the ideal solution?

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