Some political issues don’t become mainstream talking points, but that doesn’t make them any less urgent.
They’re more like “hygiene [and] vegetables,” quipped Danielle Coffey, president and CEO of the News/Media Alliance, as in, a little unglamorous, but crucial for a healthy body.
Or, in this case, a healthy content marketplace.
In late July, three US representatives – Valerie Foushee (D-NC), Laurel Lee (R-FL) and Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) – introduced the Stealth Bot Prohibition Act in the House. The bill is a proposed piece of bipartisan legislation authored by the News/Media Alliance, a trade association that represents over 2,000 media brands. If passed, it would require AI stealth crawlers to disclose their identity and purpose to the host of a website. (A version of the act passed in New York state earlier this year.)
These so-called “bad bots” are “creating a reseller market,” Coffey said, by crawling and scraping publisher sites and then serving or selling the content elsewhere without permission.
