About PAID
PAID is an initiative that builds the solution governments need to profit from the agent economy — the legal, technical, and economic toolkits that let local governments charge commercial bots for automated access to public data, while keeping that data free for residents.
Every day, automated bots crawl municipal websites — extracting public records, property data, meeting minutes, budget documents, and more. The companies running these bots profit from the data. The municipalities pay for the servers, bandwidth, and infrastructure that make that extraction possible. Residents who want the same data get it free through FOIL. The bots get a free ride.
PAID exists to change that — lawfully, transparently, and without restricting public access. We researched whether New York municipalities can charge commercial bots for automated access to data that would otherwise be available through FOIL. The answer is yes, under existing home rule authority and open-records law. We then built the toolkit a municipality needs to do it: a model ordinance, an implementation playbook, a data organization guide, and interactive tools. And we offer paid implementation services to governments that want help putting it all in place.
The research is published freely. There is no paywall, no lead capture form, and no obligation to hire anyone. If a municipality wants to use the toolkit on its own, it is all here. If it wants help, PAID builds that too.
Automated agents — crawlers, scrapers, AI training pipelines, and autonomous software that reads public data at machine speed — are growing exponentially. Within a few years, bots will outnumber humans requesting public records by orders of magnitude. The cost of serving them falls on the municipality; the value of the data is captured upstream by the companies that run them.
Governments should profit from that shift, not fear it. The agent economy is not going away. The right response is not to block automated access or restrict public transparency — it is to charge for commercial automated access at fair, transparent, lawful rates, and reinvest the revenue in the public infrastructure that produces the data in the first place. PAID is built to make that response practical.
Policy & law
Model ordinances, legal memoranda, and fee structures that let a municipality charge for commercial automated access under existing home rule and open-records authority — without restricting resident access.
Technical infrastructure
robots.txt policy, rate limiting, API metering, CDN/WAF rules, and metered-access architecture that distinguish commercial bots from residents — and bill the bots, not the public.
Data readiness
Data organization, metadata standards, and open-data platform guidance so a municipality's records are clean enough to meter, bill, and reinvest revenue into better public data infrastructure.
John Peter Quigley
John is a systems advisor based in Ulster County, New York. His professional identity is Systems Advisor. Powered by AI.He helps high-agency leaders use AI to reclaim time, improve decisions, and multiply resources through his business, Quigley Group.
John directed this initiative: defining the scope, setting the ground rules, reviewing the findings, and deciding what to publish and what to build. He is also an active civic participant in Ulster County — serving as First Vice Chairman of the Ulster County Republican Committee and Secretary of Twaalfskill Golf Club.
AI Research Agents
The primary research was conducted by a team of AI agents working in parallel:
- Legal Research Agent — NY FOIL, FOIA, public records law, bot access, case law
- Technical Research Agent — web crawling, robots.txt, rate limiting, API metering, CDN/WAF
- Economic Research Agent — existing fee structures, PACER, bulk data, monetization precedents
- Data Architecture Agent — data organization best practices, metadata standards, open-data platforms
A synthesis agent compiled the findings into a unified research paper. Two additional agents drafted the model ordinance and implementation playbook. Every source the agents fetched is logged in a public source registry — 73 sources, with unverified ones explicitly flagged.
The AI agents fetched primary sources (statutes, case law, vendor docs, RFCs, government reports) directly. Each source was verified against primary text where possible. When a source could not be verified — due to 403 errors, scanned PDFs, or interactive search interfaces — it was flagged as unverified rather than presented as established fact. This is the methodology page's central commitment: every claim traces to a source, and every source's verification status is explicit.
Grounded research
Every factual claim cites a primary source. No assertions without a citation. If a claim cannot be grounded in a source, it is flagged as analysis or opinion explicitly. The full source registry is published — 73 sources, each with a stable ID, verification status, and notes on what it establishes.
Cited sources
Sources are cited inline with stable IDs (S-NNN) that resolve to the public registry. You can trace any claim in the research paper back to a specific source entry, check the original URL, and verify it yourself. Unverified sources are flagged with a visible badge — never hidden.
Plain language
The target reader is a municipal official with no technical or legal background. Every term is defined. The research paper, model ordinance, and playbook are written to be read — not to impress. The interactive tools let an official model revenue and costs without hiring a consultant.
Not advocacy
This is research presenting an opportunity and the risks honestly. We are not arguing that every municipality should charge for data access. We are showing that they can, how they would, and being explicit about what we don't yet know. The research gaps section is as important as the recommendations.
A Quigley Group initiative
PAID is a Quigley Group initiative — John Peter Quigley's systems advisory business. It is not a client project. No municipality commissioned the research. No one paid for it. John directed the work because the question — can local governments lawfully charge for automated data access, and how do they build it? — is interesting and underserved.
PAID does two things. First, it publishes free research: the toolkit is open, with no paywall, no lead capture form, and no obligation to hire anyone. Second, it offers paid implementation services to governments that want help standing up the policy, infrastructure, and data readiness the research describes. The research is free; the build is a service.
Help is available, not required
The toolkit is designed to be usable without a consultant. A municipal attorney can read the research paper and model ordinance. An IT director can read the playbook and data guide. An elected official can use the interactive tools to model revenue.
If a municipality wants help implementing the recommendations — drafting a local law, standing up a data program, metering automated access, evaluating vendors — PAID provides that as a paid service through Quigley Group. But it is not required, and the toolkit works without it.
This is a first version. The research is grounded and cited, but it is not complete. There are 17 documented research gaps — from NY procurement law that couldn't be fetched to a 50-state open-records fee survey that wasn't completed. Those gaps are published openly on the transparency page, not hidden.
We want feedback, corrections, and contributions. If you are a municipal official, an open-government advocate, a vendor, or a researcher — and you see something we got wrong, or a gap we should fill — we want to hear from you. The toolkit improves every time someone catches an error.
The next version should fill the research gaps, expand the national appendix beyond New York, and incorporate real-world feedback from any municipality that tries the toolkit. Alongside the research, PAID's services offering is the path from published toolkit to deployed municipal program — policy drafting, infrastructure stand-up, and data readiness work that turns the research into revenue. That implementation work is now open to governments that want to move first.
Fill the verified-source gaps. Complete the 50-state fee survey. Find a municipality willing to pilot the model ordinance — and, through the services offering, help it stand up the metering, billing, and data program end to end. Publish the results — whether they confirm or contradict this research.
Start a conversation
The research paper, model ordinance, implementation playbook, data guide, and interactive tools are all free. If your government wants help building it — policy, infrastructure, and data readiness — PAID offers paid implementation services through Quigley Group. Start wherever is most relevant to you.
Full research paper
Legal landscape, technical landscape, economic models, data organization, and recommendations. Every claim cited.
Read →Methodology & sources
Full disclosure, open methodology, the 73-source registry, and 17 known research gaps.
View →Implementation help
Want help drafting the ordinance, standing up metering, or building the data program? PAID offers paid implementation services.
Services →