Anti-Circumvention Laws Raise the Cost of Knowledge

The vast amount of information on the open web requires researchers and journalists to adapt with new tools to make sense of it all. Checking facts, gauging public opinion, and other lines of inquiry depend on being able to analyze the overwhelming amount of material posted online every day. Unfortunately, responding to the AI industry’s voracious appetite for data, companies stewarding this public data are looking to cash in and block access to the open web. This makes the web harder to navigate, and threatens all kinds of important research. Reddit’s lawsuit against SerpAPI[1] and Perplexity threatens to do exactly that. Reddit was once a very open platform, fostering a community of alternative apps and extensions putting users in...

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