I wonder if Google’s unlimited legal budget plays a role. Not a lawyer, so probably way off here…

But, for example, reddit’s success in part depends on Google ingesting their data — reddit shows up in Google searches all the time, which can only happen if Google uses reddit’s content. So reddit telling Google “you can’t use our content” doesn’t work, and they need to say something like, “you can use our content for search results but you can’t consume it as training data.”

This is a pretty straightforward statement/request/demand, but one could imagine Google lawyers maliciously complying and throwing their hands up dramatically, claiming “well we use some amount of AI in our search results, so if we can’t use your content for AI training then we can’t risk using it for search results.” Which would, I imagine, really, really hurt reddit (no Google results would be catastrophic I suspect).

So, perhaps the “low” 60M figure is just Google using their leverage.

Or not. As a random person on the Internet, I can say I’m probably not contributing anything meaningful here…