(Reclaim The Net) The internet’s most frequented page is on the verge of a transformation unlike any in its 25-year history.
Last week, at Google I/O 2024, as Liz Reid, Google’s head of Search, gushed on stage about their AI-powered future, one couldn’t help but feel a pang of irony. “Google will do the Googling for you,” she proclaimed, envisioning a future where Google’s AI sifts through the web’s content and spits out neatly packaged summaries, removing the need to visit any websites.
How convenient – for Google, that is.
An ideologically driven monopoly further inserting itself between people and content, filtering out what it thinks you should be allowed to see (and what you shouldn’t) at a level never seen before. What could possibly go wrong?
At the event, the tech behemoth unveiled its latest shiny toys – an AI agent named Astra, a potentially reincarnated Google Glass, and something called Gems. Amidst the fanfare, though, there was a glaring omission: any mention of the voices who populate the web with the very work that makes Google’s empire possible.
But the origins of Google’s powerful monopoly and control over much of the internet’s content came a couple of decades ago when publishers and website creators made a deal with a devil whose motto was, at the time, “Don’t be evil.”
The transition was swift and brutal. In the early days of the web, news outlets and publishers thought they saw a digital gold rush, envisioning a future where their reach extended beyond the physical limitations of print. They rushed online, eager to embrace this new medium. Initially, some charged for access, mirroring their print subscription models.
However, it soon became clear that the internet of the time operated on a different set of economics. The vast expanse of free information available online made many people recoil at the idea of paying for original content.
