this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2025
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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.

Archive : https://archive.ph/nhrYS

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[–] Alloi@lemmy.world 1 points 2 weeks ago

let it die.

[–] turtlesareneat@discuss.online 1 points 2 weeks ago

The internet was a mistake. We know that now. People have never been more connected yet never been more lonely. It's a trap, a false oasis. AI could kill it and I'd sleep happy. There has to be a way to make the tech work FOR us instead of AGAINST us.

[–] vivendi@programming.dev 0 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

the internet as we know is dying.

A new net will be born from it's ashes.

Either bitch about it, or let's make the future net to our liking.

those who do not adapt die, the one universal law.

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[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 0 points 2 weeks ago

Can anything save it? Yes: REGULATION. Regulate all this shit (AI, online advertising, webcrawlers) down to the pixel if needed. Fine the companies and their CEOs into 3 generations of bankruptcy.

But, since politicians are either too stupid, too old, too corrupt, or any combination thereof, nothing's gonna happen.

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