An esoteric battle over API fees and access is highlighting a power struggle between corporate overlords and unpaid moderators. It's worth understanding, and it's worth fighting for.
Regarding the “real” issue being the use of the API by AI developers: It’s been evident for at least the last few years that this was going on, and I had seen it as a positive thing—that we were helping to create a training corpus that would be freely accessible to everyone, not just a handful of corporations with their own proprietary data.
It’s worth noting that any company that operates a search engine probably has a copy of the whole web anyway and does not need to do API calls to get it. They just scrape it for search indexing. This includes, e.g., Microsoft and Google.
Regarding the “real” issue being the use of the API by AI developers: It’s been evident for at least the last few years that this was going on, and I had seen it as a positive thing—that we were helping to create a training corpus that would be freely accessible to everyone, not just a handful of corporations with their own proprietary data.
It’s worth noting that any company that operates a search engine probably has a copy of the whole web anyway and does not need to do API calls to get it. They just scrape it for search indexing. This includes, e.g., Microsoft and Google.