AI is killing the web - #47
Series “Controversies”
Introduction
Welcome back to Controversies, the column where we ignore the glossy “internet is bigger than ever” slideware and pry open the pipes that feed the attention economy. This time the fault line doesn’t run through one billionaire’s platform—it cuts across the entire open web. Chatbots are strip‑mining publishers’ work, packaging tidy answers, and sending users away with zero clicks. The result? Ad stacks wobble, subscription funnels dry up, and a scramble is on to make bots pay before creators starve. What’s at stake isn’t just traffic—it’s the economic bargain that kept information (mostly) free for humans. From Google’s AI overviews to OpenAI’s meteoric reach, from Cloudflare’s emerging bot tollbooths to Tollbit’s metered crawls and ProRata’s revenue splits, publishers are toggling between “wooing & suing” in a bid to stay alive. If they fail, the free‑to‑read internet could shrink into a data mine accessed mainly by machines—and that’s bad for markets, research, and democracy.
In this edition, we’ll explore:
The Day the Clicks Dried Up — How AI answer engines are siphoning visits and vaporizing ad inventory.
Wooing & Suing — Why publishers cut deals with OpenAI even as they lawyer up against upstarts.
Charging the Robots — Cloudflare gates, Tollbit meters, ProRata payout math, and the dream that humans read free while bots pay plenty.
Strap in: today’s volatility isn’t bandwidth—it’s the spread between AI convenience and creator collapse. Inspired by reporting in The Economist (July 14 2025); let’s take the argument further and map where the value (and risk) flows next.
