[advael]

I mean, that seems to be exactly how he's defining "open web" here, actually. That which is - in the dichotomy presented by these two quotes - "the open web" is free game for any use, and he defines things that use language that explicitly disallows all uses except indexing as the complement of this category. Maybe he'd accept any site that effectively declares any "whitelist" of acceptable uses in this category too, though this isn't explicitly stated.

His contention is an assumptive close, wrapping the assumption that anything not explicitly labeled otherwise must use a "blacklist" policy where any usage not specifically forbidden is permitted into "the social contract" that he claims to be so obvious as to not permit challenge

He would like the "grey area" of legal debate on this matter, as he explained quite clearly, to be exclusively about whether AI models can be enforcably barred from training on content for which such a narrow whitelist of acceptable uses has been defined. Naturally this would mean both that the courts could decide such a blanket ban can't bar msft (or anyone) from using this content to train AI models, but also that the court needn't or maybe even can't decide that failure to ban this use case explicitly (or adopt a similar "whitelist" style blanket ban) makes acceptance of it legally implied. Hell, he even leaves room for explicitly banning this use to be rendered legally unenforceable

I can see why he would want that to be the overton window!