According to People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel, Google is abusing its market power through a single, unified web crawler used for both search and AI training. The predicament facing publishers: they want to block AI crawlers from scraping their content, but can't refuse Google without losing valuable search traffic. People Inc. has negotiated AI licensing deals with Meta, OpenAI, and Microsoft—with Microsoft's structured as pay-per-use rather than unlimited access. Vogel framed the business reality: AI companies need models, computing power, and content. His company generates more quality content at scale than nearly anyone else, giving publishers unexpected leverage in negotiations.

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