terms.txt: A Consent and Compensation Protocol for Agentic Web Access

Abstract:The open web ran on an unwritten bargain: sites admitted crawlers, and search engines sent visitors back. Public measurements show that bargain breaking under AI crawlers and agents. Automated clients now make up most requests, training dominates Cloudflare-classified crawling, and the largest AI platforms fetch thousands of pages for each visitor they return. The web's common control, this http URL, cannot express identity, purpose, terms, or price, can be circumvented, and newer alternatives are largely proprietary CDN features. We specify this http URL, a this http URL-style file for per-path, per-purpose machine-access terms, plus an origin-enforced exchange using Web Bot Auth signatures, signed intent, delegation tokens, HTTP 402 negotiation, and signed receipts. We define what the exchange can enforce, audit, and leave to contract. A dependency-free implementation adds 0.20 to 0.65 ms per request on one vCPU.

7 pages, 1 figure, 2 tables. Submitted to IEEE Internet Computing, Special Issue on Future Internet Systems with LLMs and Agents. Code and raw results: this https URL

Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computers and Society (cs.CY)

C.2.2; H.3.5; K.4.4

arXiv:2609.11152 [cs.NI]

(or arXiv:2609.11152v1 [cs.NI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.11152 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)