Inside the collapse of the internet economy (and what comes next)

I mean, it's a very appealing notion.

It's similar to what we've seen with recorded music.

You get the rights agencies collect revenue from all over the shop and they figure out how to apportion it I guess one of the things that struck me about what's been happening with this shift to what you call answer engines is that it's unmasked a fundamental leakiness about the internet anyway.

The internet was such that collectively all of the content amounted to much more than adding linearly, arithmetically, any single piece of content.

And collectively, the value that we got from it was greater than the sum of all the individual bits of value that we as users got from it.

And from all of that enormous value, GDP struggled to count it.

We ended up with it being funneled, a very small portion of it, to Google.

So there was this issue that there's this enormous... wealth of richness out there.

And maybe 10% of that value showed up and nearly all of that went to Google.

So are we just unmasking a longer standing problem here? If you think about it, though, like

Google has been really one of the real good guys in the web ecosystem.

If Google hadn't created all of the monetization tools that we have, I think the web would be significantly smaller than it is today.

And so, yes, they have reaped significant rewards, but nobody has actually given back to the open web at the scale that Google has.

The irony, though, is that it's sort of like, you know, it's like a Marvel movie.

Whoever was, you know, the hero before becomes the villain, you know, in the next story.

And I think right now Google is at a real inflection point.

where they are the ones who are actually saying, we are unwilling to pay for content in this new AI world because we've always gotten it for free.

But what's changed, what's changed is that in the past, when Google got the content for free, they gave something back, which was traffic.

Now Google is saying, we want to get the content still for free, but we're unwilling to actually give traffic back.

And again, it's not a willingness, it's actually the interface doesn't inherently give content back.

And so the force that really has to change in order to get this to happen is Google has to say the business model of yesterday isn't going to be the business model of the future.

Us being the patron of the web is still incredibly important.

And we and everyone else who are getting benefit from this for these AI engines that we're creating, we should actually be compensating content creators for that.

I'm actually optimistic.

that one, Google will come around to that perspective, either, you know, willingly or they'll be forced to.