The next Protocols for Publishers event is tentatively booked in Toronto for September 30 to October 1st, 2026. We have secured a few partners, some amazing speakers, and will be hosting some of the biggest and innovative names in Canadian media. There is still more work to be done in making this real, which is where we can really use your help. If you can be in Toronto this fall please drop your email in the form below and let us know you are interested, and share with people you think should be in the room. This helps us to find the right sponsors, speakers, and to tailor the topics.

As per our usual format, the evening Showcase event on Sep 30 will be public and feature talks from some of the smartest folks working at the intersection of AI and publishing in Canada. The following day Oct 1 will be dedicated to the Stakeholder Forum where publishers and protocol developers will deep dive on discoverability, distribution, and engagement on the Open Social Web and in an AI-mediated environment. As always, the goal will be to surface concrete actions that we can take as a community to push forward protocol-based publishing, and gain more agency for publishers and readers.

This Edition's Reading

It has been a month since our last newsletter, so this one is double-stuffed with some curated goodies from around the web 🍬

🎶 Same song, different verse

Anthropic and OpenAI closed the spigot to their APIs for a few weeks under pressure from the US government. How do you think about building your business or product based on a service that can be turned off in an instant? Protocols > Platforms.

Early last month the EU released its new digital sovereignty strategy looking to build capacity "to act independently in the digital world by developing and controlling key technologies, data, and infrastructure, while reducing reliance on non-EU providers." It is a package of contradictions. https://www.techpolicy.press/does-europe-really-have-a-plan-for-tech-sovereignty/

Last week the EU, Germany and Greece joined Pax Silica, the US administration's initiative to build a supply chain for semis, REEs, and AI to counterbalance China. Canada is still just an "observer." More digital sovereignty mixed messages? https://www.state.gov/releases/under-secretary-for-economic-affairs/2026/06/under-secretary-jacob-helberg-on-the-accession-of-the-european-union-germany-and-greece-to-pax-silica/

Substack is launching ads. Ben Evans points out "The founders were very vocal in declaring that things like recommendation systems, news feeds and ads were stupid and evil, and now they’re doing all of them." https://on.substack.com/p/a-business-model-that-works-for-creators

⚖️ From the courts

The UK Competition & Markets Authority published its final legal ruling requiring Google to give publishers "effective controls" over how their content is used in search and generative AI. https://www.gov.uk/find-digital-markets-measures/google-search-publisher-conduct-requirement

A German court ruled that Google is legally liable for false statements generated by its AI overviews. Google is appealing the decision. https://www.wired.com/story/a-court-has-ruled-that-google-is-liable-for-false-statements-generated-by-ai-overviews/

🕵 Agent Handling

How three publications are rebuilding their sites for AI. This is a bit of an ad, but it does show some practical things that pubs are doing to handle AI bots. https://digiday.com/media/how-time-and-others-are-rebuilding-parts-of-the-web-for-ai-agents/

Discovery has been a challenge for agentic AI systems looking for tools to execute tasks. There are 10s of thousands of MCP servers, countless APIs and skills, and other formats that agent harnesses can utilize. A group of "agent builders" have published the Agentic Resource Discovery Specification to make your website capabilities discoverable https://agenticresourcediscovery.org

Regarding the above item, just want to flip back to this piece from Richard MacManus a couple of months ago which has the key framing of "websites as capabilities": The agentic web: how AI systems will change websites https://ricmac.org/2026/04/07/the-agentic-web

The Linux Foundation announced the Agent Name Service, building atop existing DNS infra to give agents a trustable identity layer. Cue jokes about DNS. https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/linux-foundation-announces-intent-to-launch-agent-name-service-to-establish-trusted-identity-infrastructure-for-ai-agents

📑 Reports Season

The annual Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (RISJ) Digital News Report shows platformization is accelerating with reduction of traffic to news orgs' own sites. Social and video platforms are winning the traffic. This is not just explained by demographics. AI chatbots used for news gained ground from 7% to 10% globally, but still way lower than social media. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026

In a deeper dive article on AI chatbots and journalism the Reuters Institute notes that referral traffic is still very low, but the people who do click are basically clicking to verify the sources, recommending that publishers "need to focus not only on visibility, but on what makes their journalism distinct, including their role as trusted sources in a noisy information environment and deeper reporting that goes beyond what AI can easily replicate." https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2026/emerging-uses-ai-chatbots-news-and-what-it-means-journalism

(The RISJ report has a ton of data, if you don't have time check out some highlights from NiemanLab https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/06/news-sites-are-the-new-newspapers-people-are-abandoning-them-for-social-media/)

A massive Pew report on AI sentiment in the US shows low excitement towards AI and about a quarter of US adults use chatbots daily. Lots more data on gender and ethnic differences. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/06/17/americans-and-ai-2026-chatbots-smart-devices-and-views-on-impact/

Amnesty International report digs into the human rights costs of genAI, arguing web scraping is a violation of the Right to Privacy. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol40/0996/2026/en/

Automattic released their Future of the Web 2026 report with the striking stat that 74% consumers say the internet feels less human than 10 years ago. The report is broken into 5 chapters covering discovery, trust, AI content governance, regulations, and more. The Chapter 3 introduction is stark: "AI Is a New Channel. The Old Channels Still Aren't Yours." Perhaps a reflection of the RISJ recommendation in the above item, Automattic recommends owning your own means of publishing and making it a trustworthy, "human-feeling" destination. https://wpvip.com/future-of-the-web-2026/

🎉 Now for some good news!

🏆 Winners! Let's take a moment to celebrate some PfP✨ alums: Newsmast Foundation, Blacksky Algorithms, and Sill Social won the inaugural Open Social Awards. Congratulations! 🎊 https://newpublic.org/OSA

Also see The European Social Stack Open Declaration, a set of common principles agreed by complementary technology leaders launched at PublicSpaces in Amsterdam https://european.social/

Two-time PfP✨ Stakeholder alumnus ROOST has released their 1.0! 👏 Read about Coop 1.0: "the World’s First Free, Open Source Child Safety Infrastructure for Every Platform" https://roost.tools/blog/coop-1-0-world-s-first-free-open-source-child-safety-infrastructure-for-every-platform

Bridgy Fed helps connect the Open Social Web by connecting networks on different protocols like Mastodon and Bluesky, so you can be on one network but still keep in touch with your friends on the other. But they understand the problem of lock-in, and so have now launched a "credible exit" from the Bridge https://blog.anew.social/migrations-update-launch/

Waag Future Lab moved their Bluesky data to Eurosky. https://waag.org/en/article/why-we-moved-our-bluesky-data-eurosky/

More and more blogs have started using Standard.site (see last month's newsletter) and now we have a dedicated reader for long-form writing across the ATmosphere. Look forward to many new experiments in reader experience. https://bsky.app/profile/standard-reader.app/post/3mnuvtqxmos2t