Movement for an Open Web

The Movement for an Open Web (MOW) is a UK publisher advocacy group that on 15 June 2026 launched Search-Only Contracts, a mechanism allowing UK publisher websites to charge AI crawlers £500 per article scraped without permission. The initial tranche of 31 publisher sites signed up, including Trusted Reviews (Candr Media), road.cc, and ebiketips.co.uk (F-At). The contracts add a standard clause to each site's terms and conditions and Robots.txt, with enforcement through the county-court Moneyclaim small-claims service (filing fee roughly £50), enabling publishers to self-represent without specialist intellectual property counsel.

MOW co-founder Tim Cowan, a lawyer, designed the enforcement route to sidestep the cost and complexity of IP litigation. The strategy is predicated on New York State bill A11292, passed on 5 June 2026, which requires AI crawlers to disclose their identity or face penalties of $15,000 per day. Without mandatory crawler identification, publishers cannot invoice an anonymous scraper. The MOW framework treats web scraping as a debt-collection problem: once a named crawler can be identified, each article it takes becomes a quantified, claimable debt.

The MOW's model is an attempt to monetise publisher content without resorting to litigation against AI companies or depending on revenue-sharing deals that larger publishers (notably News Corp, Associated Press, and The Atlantic) have negotiated individually. It is targeted specifically at search-mode AI crawlers, distinguishing them from general web indexers.