The rise of ChatGPT and its rivals is undermining the economic bargain of the internet

Around the beginning of last year, Matthew Prince started receiving worried calls from the bosses of big media companies. They told Mr Prince, whose firm, Cloudflare, provides security infrastructure to about a fifth of the web, that they faced a grave new online threat. “I said, ‘What, is it the North Koreans?’,” he recalls. “And they said, ‘No. It’s AI’.”

Those executives had spotted the early signs of a trend that has since become clear: artificial intelligence is transforming the way that people navigate the web. As users pose their queries to chatbots rather than conventional search engines, they are given answers, rather than links to follow. The result is that “content” publishers, from news providers and online forums to reference sites such as Wikipedia, are seeing alarming drops in their traffic.

As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web may evolve into something very different.

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  • meowmeowbeanz@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    16·
    3 days ago

    sigh Here we go again with another “the web is dying” piece from the corporate propaganda machine.

    Look, I get it - traffic numbers are down, ad revenue is tanking, and the surveillance capitalism model that’s been propping up the “free” web is finally showing cracks. But can we please stop pretending this is some unprecedented crisis?

    The web has been “dying” since social networks, then mobile apps, now AI chatbots. Each time, the same voices cry about the end times while completely missing the actual structural problems. The issue isn’t that AI is “stealing” content - it’s that we built an entire internet economy on the absurd premise that eyeballs = money, and now we’re shocked when the eyeballs find more efficient ways to get information.

    What’s really happening here is rent-seeking behavior disguised as innovation protection. These “licensing deals” between News Corp and OpenAI? That’s just the old gatekeepers trying to maintain their position in a shifting landscape. Meanwhile, the hundreds of millions of small domains that actually make the web interesting get left out entirely.

    The technical solutions are way more promising than the legal theater. Cloudflare’s pay-as-you-crawl system? Now that’s thinking like an engineer instead of a lawyer. Set proper rate limits, charge for bot access, let humans browse free. Simple.

    But here’s what The Economist won’t tell you: the web isn’t dying, it’s decentralizing. While everyone’s panicking about Google traffic, we’ve got ActivityPub, IPFS, self-hosted everything. The corporate web might be having an existential crisis, but the actual web - the one built by people who care about information sharing rather than ad impressions - is doing just fine.

    Stack Overflow seeing fewer questions because AI answers coding queries? Good. Maybe now we’ll get better documentation instead of the same “how do I center a div” asked 50,000 times. Quality over quantity was always the point.

    The funniest part is watching Google try to have it both ways - claiming the web is expanding by 45% while simultaneously building AI overviews that eliminate the need to visit those expanding sites. Peak corporate doublethink.

    Want to save “the web”? Stop depending on centralized platforms for discovery. Self-host. Use RSS feeds. Support decentralized protocols. The technical infrastructure for a resilient, user-controlled web already exists. We just need to stop pretending that what’s good for Google’s shareholders is good for the internet.

    • kassiopaea@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      1·
      2 days ago

      Look, I appreciate your argument and generally agree with it, but it also kinda smells like an AI wrote it. If so, I appreciate the irony. Either way, have an upvote.

      • DapperPenguin@programming.dev
        1·
        1 day ago

        I appreciate reading comments that are well written. If an AI was used to create the argument in its entirety, or edit it, so be it. What matters is content and context. If it’s eloquent, without being obnoxiously verbose, that’s a bonus. It doesn’t feel like a lot of filler bullshit was added. ETA: I want to clarify, flooding the web with AI bots to astroturf agendas is not cool.