There are many possibilities. Perhaps they're allowed to use anything publicly accessible but have to release their model every x amount of time, which might be a month or a year. My biggest fear is that as happened with copyright's limited term, this limited term would get chipped away at over the years.

Another would be that they couldn't sell access to customers directly but rather must license it out to various entities at rates set by regulators. Those entities then would compete with each other for end customers. This of course might be prone to regulatory capture like happens with utilities.