On 2 June, the European Commission holds its first workshop to identify text and data mining (TDM) opt-out protocols that GPAI model providers must comply with under the AI Act. The framing of the process is a negotiation between two groups: AI companies and rightsholders. That framing is wrong, and the consequences of getting this wrong will be felt far beyond either group.
This Is Not a Bilateral Trade Dispute
The protocols being discussed here will not just govern how a handful of large AI developers crawl a handful of major publishers. They will govern how automated systems interact with the entire public web.
That means: universities and open access repositories whose content underpins scientific research; libraries and cultural heritage institutions whose digital collections serve the public; individual creators, journalists, bloggers, and civil society organisations who publish online without the legal and technical resources of large commercial publishers; small businesses across every sector; and the open source communities whose work constitutes a substantial proportion of what is publicly available online.
None of these groups was meaningfully represented in the December 2025 consultation that forms the basis for the 2 June workshop. Of 153 respondents, 60% were rightsholders — dominated by book and press publishers — and just 7% were GPAI model providers. Everyone else was folded into an “other stakeholders” category that does not capture the full range of interests at stake.
A process structured as a negotiation between content industries and AI developers, aimed at reaching “general agreement” between those two groups, is not an adequate basis for decisions that will reshape access to and control over the public internet. The Commission is not setting commercial terms between two sectors. It is setting infrastructure-level rules for the web. That requires a broader mandate, broader participation, and broader scrutiny than this process has delivered so far.
The Commission’s Own Report Undermines Its Own Front-Runners
The summary report published ahead of the workshop records “a certain level of divergence across stakeholder groups, both in terms of technical assessment and overall positioning.” That is the headline finding. The three front-runners — TDMRep, C2PA TDM Assertions, and JPEG Trust Core Foundation V2 — are each described in terms that do not support endorsement.
GPAI model provider assessments of TDMRep are “predominantly critical or cautious,” citing limited adoption, uneven uptake across sectors, and scalability challenges. C2PA’s application to TDM opt-out signalling “remains experimental, with uncertain scalability and limited real-world deployment,” and the relevant functionality sits in third-party extensions rather than the core specification. JPEG Trust was not designed as an opt-out mechanism, is limited to JPEG files, and is acknowledged even by rightsholders to be at an early stage of development.
Measure 1.3(1)(b) requires protocols to be state-of-the-art, technically implementable, and widely adopted across cultural sectors. The consultation evidence does not show that any of the three front-runners meets all three criteria.
Privately Controlled Protocols Have No Place on a Regulatory List
The consultation report records clear opposition from AI developers and other respondents to privately controlled or proprietary protocols that create dependencies and distort competition. This concern is amplified when the protocols in question will affect the whole web.
Endorsing privately operated mechanisms gives those operators a state-sanctioned competitive advantage and forces compliance through commercial relationships rather than open standards. Open access publishers, research repositories, and smaller content producers who lack the resources to engage with proprietary systems on commercial terms will be structurally disadvantaged. Any protocol endorsed under this process must be open, community-governed, and free from control by a single private entity with a financial stake in its adoption.
Multiple Non-Interoperable Protocols Create the Problem They Claim to Solve
The report also records that multiple non-interoperable protocols operating simultaneously generate conflicting signals and legal uncertainty. If one protocol permits AI training at domain level and another forbids it at file level, there is no workable resolution. This problem scales with the diversity of the web. The broader the population implementing different combinations of mechanisms — and on the open web that population is enormous — the more frequent and consequential those conflicts become. Endorsing a list before interoperability frameworks are in place does not create certainty. It multiplies confusion.
What Should Happen on 2 June
The Commission should use the workshop to do three things. First, acknowledge openly that the scope of this process extends to the entire web ecosystem and commit to a second consultation phase that reaches the constituencies currently absent. Second, apply the criteria of Measure 1.3(1)(b) honestly to the current candidates and acknowledge that none of them yet qualifies. Third, give the IETF’s AIPREF working group — which is developing open, internationally recognised standards through a genuinely multi-stakeholder process — the space and time to deliver before any durable list is published.
The web belongs to everyone. The rules governing how it is crawled should be set by a process that reflects that.