How Tech Rules

New York Review of Books' article “How Tech Rules” highlights that modern tech corporations increasingly own themselves, blurring the line between shareholders and managers and concentrating decision‑making power within the firms themselves. For website owners, this self‑ownership trend signals that AI‑driven platforms may soon enforce their own content and traffic policies without external oversight, meaning bots crawling sites could be subject to proprietary rules embedded in the companies’ internal AI systems. Expect tighter automated vetting of inbound traffic, with platforms potentially blocking or throttling visits that don’t align with their self‑defined standards—affecting SEO, analytics, and ad revenue. **Actionable steps:** 1. **Update your llms.txt** to explicitly list permitted AI agents and request that self‑owned tech platforms honor your bot directives, citing the new corporate self‑ownership model as justification. 2. **Deploy a bot‑fingerprinting tool** that flags traffic from AI services owned by the same corporate entity (e.g., internal crawlers from self‑owned platforms) and route them to a sandbox for compliance checks. 3. **Monitor platform policy changes** via their developer portals; many self‑owned firms will publish API updates that override generic robots.txt rules, so stay ahead by subscribing to their change‑notification feeds.