March 12th, 2026
Do you remember the Open Web? Web rings, directories,
GeoCities, random personal web pages and all sorts of
quirky resources out in the open, linked to one
another and easily accessible, all without requiring
anybody to sign into anything. What an amazing thing!
It is hard to overstate the impact Tim Berners-Lee's
invention had on the world once CERN decided to make
it freely available to everybody.
The Web went through many iterations, always evolving with increased use and developing technologies. I've loved it since I first heard about it in the early 90s, even before I got my first dial-up modem to browse the web (and create my first website), and I love it still.
You could find anything on the Web (if you could find it), and nobody knew you were a dog. Today, finding anything on the web is no longer the challenge, but alongside everybody's pitching you kibble. I fear that we are starting to see the beginning of the end of the Open Web, and what we will be able to find and how we use the Web is dramatically changing.
Enshittification beyond platforms
Surveillance capitalism's vile enshittification process has begun to spread from services and platforms to the entire ecosystem. AI is unsurprisingly going to make things worse, catalyzing a Web that will consist increasingly of siloed gardens with implicit tracking and AI a functional gate keeper.
Before search engines, web directories tried to catalog the contents of the Web, which obviously didn't scale well. There's no need to rehash the history of how Google rose to dominance and in the process lead to such abominations as "Search Engine Optimization", but while today you can still pull out your phone and quickly look up how fucking magnets work, search engines increasingly try to keep you from actually visiting other websites.
An increasing amount of content is being locked up by platforms that require anybody wanting to access it to create an account and sign in, even if the service then remains free of (monetary) charge: Facebook is an entire ecosystem that by and large is hidden from those of us too stubborn to join our family and friends as Zuck's personal data piñatas. TikTok or Instagram posts frequently can only be viewed either in the app or require the user to be logged in, and scrolling any other social media site gets you a "Continue with Google" sign-in screen in no time.1
More and more newspapers, magazines, and other journalistic outlets (understandably) require subscriptions to read their digital content; when people used to publish their thoughts on a personal blog, they now "have a substack" (*throws up in his mouth*) or massage their content into a bland "Medium" post that not only looks like everybody else's, but also requires you to sign in to read it.
So while plenty of content continues to exist on the Web, our ability to access it anonymously has progressively been diminished over the years. People looking to create content aren't even aware of alternative options2, and the ubiquitous platforms are all optimizing the "locked in experience".
Enter AI
Now enter AI. These companies hoovered up all content on the Web and now regurgitate it back to you. If you pull out your phone to look up just what the hell a kumquat is, more often than not, it's AI that will give you the answer3.
In the process, AI pretty much destroys the very sites it learned from. Fewer people feel the need to post (where?) about weird edge cases they overcome or to share their path to the answer that worked for them, because they are now talking with a machine in a private conversation that nobody else can learn from. Never mind that the inherent nature of LLMs necessarily means that in the long run we're feeding it its own self-affirming excreta in a true garbage-in-garbage-out ouroboros that can only degenerate the quality of the answers it'll present to us down the road.
If we continue this trend, I see a real possibility that soon we will no longer have free, open access to the Web. Humor me for a brief Black Mirror moment:
A possible path to a closed Web
1. Search and AI are merging
This is already very clearly the case. Internet search has evolved: Early on, we used to search for individual key words, then scrolled through the list of links to follow until we found a website that contained the information we were looking for.
Then we started to search for more complex phrases and expected a link to the right page providing the answer in the first set of results. For some searches, we got and thus came to expect the answer right there above the list of links, meaning we didn't have to click anything or leave the search engine.
Natural language assistants like Siri, Alexa etc. then got us used to asking actual questions of the Web using human language. From there, AI is being integrated into search such that instead of giving you a link to a website or a fixed excerpt from a website, it now generates an answer for you.
This trend will continue and the way we interface with our search engine will be primarily through AI. We're already basically there.4
2. SEO becomes AIO
Since search is merged with AI, Search Engine
Optimization must become AI optimization5. If you want
your content to be found, you need to allow AI bots to
steal intake your content. To do
that, you can't block bots, but you must
explicitly tailor
your content to them.
Instead of the ad-infested seven-hundred-nested-divs HTML gunk you spit at humans, you better provide clean, well-structured data to the AI bots -- and only the AI bots, of course. Content that requires humans to sign in or pay will be made available for free to authenticated and identified AI bots. That way, they still get access to all the paywalled or otherwise restricted data that humans can't access.
Sure, in theory you can still self-host your blog and publish content on your own, but tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is having your own website if nobody indexes it?
3. Browsers become AI agents
Since search has merged with AI, and AI no longer gives you links to websites but only bite-sized information cud ✨ sprinkled ✨ with thoughtful emojis 🧠, who needs a browser? Sure, the app may continue to provide an option for the user to manually visit a URL (if they remember what that is), but due to the enshittified ecosystem, users already use dedicated apps6 for all their walled gardens, so this functionality will first be buried in the UI and eventually disappear.
4. Disallow non-AI web clients
With an AI-integrated Web client (formerly known as a "browser"), you're of course always signed in. Everywhere. You've delegated your various logins to the agent. This allows your AI app to ensure it displays only approved content, as required by local laws applying, say, age and decency restrictions, preventing you from exposing your fragile mind to unpatriotic thought crimes.
For obvious reasons, circumventing such laws is not only illegal, but a security risk, so OS providers will disallow the installation of alternate clients. Since software can only be installed from the OS vendor's AppStore, that risk is largely eliminated.
5. Enshittify the AI/Browser App
Killing the planet Running AI is
expensive. Now that every interaction with the "Web"
requires companies to burn a barrel of fossil fuels,
they need to find a way to recoup their many years'
worth of losses, so sure, let's start by putting ads
into the AI vomit.7
This, however, is a phenomenally terrible idea and the user experience in a conversational dialog interface is bound to land smack in the uncanny valley. Remember how ads worked in "The Truman Show"? Yeah, your AI response to your question about which bike saddle to buy will pitch you hemorrhoid cream and a gym membership. The best part is that this will be so awful that it'll prime users for the next step:
6. Charge a subscription price for web "search"
People are already used to paying for AI. If there is no real distinction between the web search and AI, and you no longer have any useful alternative to finding content, charging for what used to be called "a web search" won't feel like such a huge step. Alternatively, you offer a "basic, ad-supported" client with the ability to "upgrade" to a monthly billed ad-free "agent experience", perhaps bundled with your mobile plan or integrated into your internet service provider's offering similar to how people now pay for TV.8 So what if in the process you're widening the class, information, and privilege gap?
Now your browser/AI agent will of course let you open references to the apps it knows you have installed (and which it has an affiliate program with) "for free", and OpenGoogAI may also offer a "basic Web" package that lets you have, say, 5,000 searches a month for FREE (includes 100 bonus links to in-depth articles on all in-network apps!). The lowest tier, the "classic" version of "web search", nostalgically may even provide you with ten actual hyperlinks. Only, those won't really be useful, because at this point, the Open Web has long died.
The end
So this is the part where I'm supposed to say something like "It's not too late!" and "We can turn this ship around!", which, I suppose, is the case. But I'm not optimistic -- which is weird for me: My experience with the Web has been dominated by near boundless optimism from its early days through the silly dotcom bubble, the emergence of smart phones, and even the rise of social media. This is the first time I'm looking ahead and think we're in the process of fucking things up.
Fortunately, today there are still wonderful examples of useless web sites like this, this, or pretty much all of this. And I don't actually think that all of that will simply disappear, even though I do believe that information discovery is currently undergoing a very dangerous transformation that is bound to lead to less information sharing.
We need more individually created, published, and controlled content, available on more independent platforms and systems. You can still be part of the Open Web, so go ahead and do your own weird thing, write your own blog, and publish it yourself on your website, outside the enshittification zoo. And if none of that is your jam, maybe just make a donation to Wikipedia, because that may well be the epitome of Sir Berners-Lee's universal linked information system, still delivering on the promise of the Open Web.
March 12th, 2026
Footnotes:
[1] Even on an open platform like Mastodon -- a nic(h)e little bubble largely ignored by the world -- an increasing number of posts end up going to Bluesky accounts that inevitably are only visible to Bluesky logged-in users. ↩
[2] My first website was, of course, hosted by my
university. As you may recall, universities used to
provide students access to a shared web space, but
that appears to no longer be universally the case.
Students -- including Computer Science majors! --
no longer know what a public_html
directory on a shared file server might be for, or what a
~username in a URL might mean.
This is another example of learned helplessness, driving
a generation of possible content creators towards closed
platforms instead of setting up their own place
on the internet.
↩
[3] And -- egad! -- by now it may even know how many 'r's there are in "strawberry", or that "Kenya" not only starts with a "k-sound", but an actual fucking "k". Progress is inevitable, apparently, even if learning this evaporated enough water to hydrate your average kumquat orchard for a year. ↩
[4] Yes, yes, there's still a few indomitable nerds
still holding out against the invaders, mostly by
futilely adding "-ai" to our
search terms, appending "&udm=14", or
using https://noai.duckduckgo.com/.
Good for you. But observe how kids use their phones
and you'll find it's a lost battle.
↩
[5] "Generative Engine Optimization", or GEO, is indeed already a thing, and you know it's hitting peak bullshit targets because of course there's coverage in Forbes, AI generated humble brag pitches on LinkedIn, and a set of emerging vulture companies ready to pick the SEO carcass apart. ↩
[6] There's a certain irony in the fact that today most of these apps are of course just browser viewports talking to the service's website. ↩
[7] As Zoë Hitzig wrote in a comment to her NY Times OpEd, it's "ironic that companies claiming to transform the entire economy and cure cancer and build superintelligence can't come up with a more creative business model than ads". ↩
[8] Death by a thousand micropayments is another viable option here, especially when billed in a made-up currency like "tokens" with similar affects to those employed by casinos in their use of chips to increase gambling. Your monthly bill now includes 140,000 Premium AI Tokens and only goes up by $6.99 for the first 3 months, $12.99 after that? Sign me up! ↩
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