Publishers have spent the past few years watching their traffic slide — in some cases by more than 50% from search alone — while AI systems ingest and summarize their content at scale. The imbalance has been obvious. The infrastructure to power AI is highly commercialized. The information feeding it is not. The IAB Tech Lab thinks it’s time to fix that. Yesterday, the standards body released version 1.0 of its Content Monetization Protocols (CoMP) specification for public comment. The idea is straightforward: create a standardized way for publishers and AI systems to establish commercial terms before any crawling or content use happens. ## Building payment rails for information “AI systems require chips, power, and information. Information is the only input in that equation that does not yet have a consistent commercial infrastructure around it,” Anthony Katsur, CEO of IAB Tech Lab, said in a statement.…