I think it's fair and reasonable to assume that the AI companies will at some point start licensing their source content. Through gov/legal oversight or not remains to be seen, but OpenAI are already beginning to do so:
Google is using for 20 years unlicensed source content for their search snippets, they seem to be doing fine with it (with the exception of few news publishers).
The idea with internet search was to get people to find the source of the information they were searching for. As a matter of fact a lot information indexing was requested at the source. Google did respect the bargain for a while until they started to obfuscate getting to the source with AMP and their info snippets directly in the search, bypassing redirecting to the source. Then they started not displaying all that info at all, not even on the nth page of search results. The broth has been getting sour for a while now. Some people never wanted crawlers indexing and there were numerous discussions about how those robot.txt were ignored.
So what I see here is the historical trend broken bargains which is more or less digital theft
Thanks for the link, I appreciate it. I suppose the issue is that this just further enshittifies the internet into a small handful of walled gardens. Big players get their payday, because they could feasibly sue OpenAI and generate them enough headache. But the vast amount of content on the internet was not built by a small handful of media companies, but rather by masses of small creators. It is their work that OpenAI is profiting from and I have yet to see a credible suggestion on how they will compensate them.
The likely and rather sad outcome of all this is small creators stop publishing because what is the point if they think their work is going to be regurgitated by some AI for $20/month.