Todd A. Carpenter

Remember, when news outlets first reported that Kash Patel was spending $75,000 of taxpayer money to fly an FBI Gulfstream jet to Milan so he could watch Olympic hockey, the official spokesasshole for the FBI had this to say:

Anyone even slightly surprised?

Tickets for the 1984 Olympics in L.A. were $3. Could it happen again? Organizers promise 1 million tickets for $28 each. But people who remember 1984 aren’t sure these Olympics will feel as accessible.

Organizers for the L.A. Olympics say they’re committed to Angelenos from all walks of life enjoying the Games’ return to their city. But based on the organizers’ early framework of ticket prices, many in the city are doubtful that the Olympics will be for them.

Good morning everyone and welcome to the second day of the #NISOPlus26 conference in Baltimore!

Continuing the great conversations and idea generation work.

Updating people on various @nisoinfo.bsky.social initiatives making significant progress in early 2026:

KBART Phase III
US National PID Strategy
Cooperative Collections Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLP)

#NISOPlus25

Does your AI policy represent your organizational values?

audience: “No!”

What do you do about that?

audience: “Push forward with it anyway!”

“I love your honesty!”

#NISOPlus26

Do you have an #AI Strategy at your organization? Do you have a responsibile #AI use strategy?

#NISOPlus26

Are you using AI in your business? You may be, it might be invisible to you. It is probably on in the background but you aren’t even aware

Man with glasses at lectern with sign reading Welcome to NISO Plus Baltimore 2026 and Thank You to Our Sponsors.

And we're off! @9thprime.bsky.social kicks off Day 1 of #NISOPlus26 in Baltimore. niso.plus/niso-plus-20...

If the product development pipeline is measured and n hours not weeks, how are we going to not throw off the users? How do we manage the direction of travel and user expectations?

If publishers declare war on bots, then how do you manage the collapse of traffic? If it’s 50%+ of traffic, what is missing? How do we capture either the value or the metrics from that usage? If it exists?

At the end of every AI prompt adding “Don’t make things up” is a weird form of “Don’t hit me again”.

reCAPTCHA is one of the most horrible tools on the web. It is an embedding of the worst UX on so much of the web.

#AWSPublishing
@datadome.co

Today, the reality is that there are very few agents allowed to undertake transactions, but over next 6 months will likely explode.

Big question: How do we ensure user intent in agentic activity?
Securely connecting user agent and wallet?
Identification is critical.

#AWSPublishing
@datadome.co

Expecting to see payment protocols and and monetization strategies built upon MCP coming out in 2Q26

How do publishers keep the brand experience

#AWSPublishing
@datadome.co

Monitization strategies

Downgraded response - slowed bot response
Toll crawling - Your agent needs to pay to access
Agentic commerce - subscribe to a plan
Partnerships - NYT with Amazon or WSJ with OpenAI

#AWSPublishing
@datadome.co

#AWSPublishing
@datadome.co

Cyber security was about blocking, but now it’s now about applying those tools to understand what user behavior is doing and control what they can do.

#AWSPublishing
@datadome.co

Google traffic remains the majority of traffic for most publishers, whereas bots/agents are rapidly increasing and are likely to exceed human traffic soon

#AWSPublishing
@datadome.co

Grok is using advanced fraud techniques to get around any cyber security or fraud tools publishers are using. Very bad behavior (of course!)

#AWSPublishing
@datadome.co

30% of bots have been spoofing Google Bot, for the past 10 years.

@datadome.co
There is a crucial shift that is no longer about human vs bot traffic

What is the bot, what is it doing, is it authorized?
Web bot auth as one possible solution

Gemini is the biggest issue because it blocks auth information

#AWSPublishing

Negative impacts for AI traffic on media platforms:

Negative SEO
Loss of user/session data
Disruption of monitization
Loss of branding and trust

#AWSPublishing
@datadome.co

Publishers are a prime target for AI agents.

Although not every a crawler is created equal. There are 3 types of agents:

Training Crawlers -only one time/bursts
Prompt-time scrapers - real time summaries
Agentic scrapers - autonomous agent simulating human behavior

The current issue with AI agents is now about intent.
#AWSPublishing

robots.txt is like putting a sign on your bank vault that says “if you’re a crook, don’t come in here”

#AWSPublishing

AIs are better than humans in solving CAPTCHAs. They are useless as a security protocol in 2026

#AWSPublishing

Participating in the @awscloud.bsky.social Publishing summit in NYC today. #AWSPublishing

YouTube video by Red Bull I Skied Down Mount Everest (world first, no oxygen)

This is truly insane

youtu.be/cjZvFY6__qw?...

NISO Plus 2026 Baltimore logo with Baltimore skyline. Feb 16–18, 2026. Logos for 13 sponsor organizations: Access Innovations, Inc., ASME, Bowker, Cadmore Media, Data Conversion Laboratory, EBSCO, Edaptive Technologies, Emerald Publishing, figshare, OpenAthens, Project MUSE, Silverchair, and SPIE Digital Library. https://niso.plus

Join us in thanking the latest to sponsor #NISOPlus26,
@dclaboratory.bsky.social & @ebsco.bsky.social!

We're grateful to them & all our generous sponsors for helping us host the conversations that lead to standards. It's not to late to join them! niso.plus/niso-plus-20...

More info: niso.plus