Content gatekeeping in a GenAI world
Let me start with a bit of history. It might seem like a hard thing for today’s generation to understand, but content used to cost money – especially novel or reliable content. In order to keep up with the latest in science or tech, one needed to subscribe to journals or magazines. An encyclopedia set was an expensive necessity before the age when almost all written content became free.
It was in this time that the foundations of the World Wide Web were being laid in the internet protocol that would become http – the protocol that serves web pages and other hypermedia to the world. And that is why HTTP has had a provision for “Payment Required” responses that has gone unused for 30 years.