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What has that got to do with blocking AI crawlers?

If it's publicly funded, why shouldn't AI crawlers have access to that data? Presumably those creating the AI crawlers paid taxes that paid for the science.

> If it's publicly funded, why shouldn't AI crawlers have access to that data?

Becase it costs money to serve them the content.

If I build a business based off of consumption of publicly funded data, and that’s okay, why isn’t it okay for AI?

Is the answer regulate AI? Yes.

> If I build a business based off of consumption of publicly funded data, and that’s okay, why isn’t it okay for AI?

Because when you build it you aren't, presumably, polling their servers every fifteen minutes for the entire corpus. AI scrapers are currently incredibly impolite.

Plenty of public funded data isn't made free and public access. Sometimes you need to pay, or get a license, etc depending on what you're doing with it.

Crawlers accessing public data could be required to provide searchable access to the public data they collect. Value-for-value.

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