Category: The Web As Platform

Who Owns Search Results?

 

Image SearchEngineRoundtable

Earlier this week I posted something of a coda for the open web, but today news broke of a small victory for “how things used to be.”

The backstory: For decades, Google has been the beating heart of the Internet’s ecosystem, pumping the oxygenated lifeblood of traffic across tens of millions of revenue-starved websites. That’s all changed over the past few years as Google has erected a massive set of AI-driven walls around its core search service. As I said in “Google Encloses the Web,” Google no longer views the web as a destination, but rather as “raw material” for the company’s core product, which, like so many of its peers, is attracting and retaining human attention it can sell to advertisers and, via Gemini subscriptions, to businesses and consumers.

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Who Controls the Tokens?

Every so often the tech world appropriates a perfectly pedestrian word and imbues it with meaning well beyond its settled definition. For centuries “computer” was an obscure term referencing an obscure craft: people who performed mathematical calculations. And prior to the mid 1990s, anyone talking about a “web” was probably discussing spiders.

“Token” has broken out as technology’s latest etymological adaptation. The word has a long history in the tech world, and even richer origins in early English and Germanic languages. But as AI has ascended to primacy in tech,  “token” has become a way for executives, financiers, and journalists to grasp the maddeningly opaque workings of an industry that seems to be swallowing our economy whole.

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Will AI Ever Become a True Platform? Not Without Us….

Yesterday Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published a fascinating essay that reads as both a rebuke to frontier AI model companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, as well as a call to arms to the entire business community.

Nadella is worried that OpenAI and Anthropic are about to eat everyone’s lunch – Microsoft included. “I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the firm in an AI-driven economy,” he opines. “The last thing any of us want is a world where every company across every sector is ceding value to a few models that eat everything they see.”

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Should AI Be Addictive?

The most interesting piece of news this morning comes from Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, who made a very public point of chastising his own team for saying the quiet part out loud.

That quiet part? In an internal memo leaked to 404 Media, a Microsoft VP said his team’s goal was to “make people addicted” to Microsoft’s new Scout tool, which is fashioned on Open Claw, the AI agent project that went viral early this year. Nadella quickly quashed such sentiments, releasing a memo stating “this is absolutely a non goal! If anything we are doing the exact opposite. We want to make sure AI empowers and adds real value to human endeavor and broad economic growth! We should make our teams clear about this.”

Microsoft then went into damage control mode, with corporate comms chief Frank Shaw piling on that Scout is for “helping people accomplish tasks more effectively—not encouraging dependency. Our goal isn’t more screen time. It’s more time back.”

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Google Encloses The Web

Last month Google announced the most significant change to its search product since its launch in 1998. Its iconic search box, which I’ve long compared to a command line for the Internet, has been redesigned to incorporate multi-modal chatbot capabilities. In essence, Google is no longer going to send you off to the best possible destination for your query. Now it’s built to capture your input and convert it into answers (and actions) all in one place – on Google.com.

Google’s announcement was expected – the company had to compete with the new paradigm of “answer engines” from OpenAI and Anthropic. But when the shoe did drop, my inbox filled with trepidation. Google has been the beating heart of the Internet’s circulatory system. Now that it’s evolved into a self-contained walled garden, how will the open web survive?

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Data Is Non Rivalrous. Why Have We Enclosed It?

One of the many reasons I’m a fan of reading history is its ability to offer frameworks for understanding the present. I recently finished Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History, a 1,300-page monument to scholarship that The New York Times praised as “generational” in its importance. I tend to agree. Its pages contain foundational truths which enliven today’s debate around the role of technology in society.

Beckert argues that over the past millennium, capitalism’s amoral ideology of “accumulation above all else” has become so deeply embedded in the global political economy that we no longer question its core assumptions.

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OpenAI Plans on Marketing Its Way To Glory. Bonne Chance!

The cookies have it.

Early this past Saturday morning I got an email from OpenAI titled “Update to our privacy policy and more controls.” I don’t recall ever getting email from the company – I signed up for ChatGPT when it launched, but haven’t used the service much since switching to Claude several years ago. But the email reminded me of a story I read from The Information last week, and I think it’s fair to say the two are related: OpenAI Sees $8 ChatGPT Driving Consumer Subscribers to 122 Million This Year.

I’ve written several posts about OpenAI’s jaw-dropping advertising ambitions, which I believe history will judge as the most audacious and potentially damaging expansion of the Internet’s data-driven advertising model since the invention of AdWords, Google’s original cash cow. OpenAI plans on scaling its advertising revenue from zero in 2025 to more than $100 billion by 2030. As I pointed out earlier, it took Google nearly two decades to reach that milestone.

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Where’s My AI Shareware?!

Back in the day.

Have you noticed all the folks bragging about the cool new tools they’ve hacked up using AI? In the last month or so, I’ve read newsletters from half a dozen or so people detailing vibe-coded apps that help them do research, organize their life, or even build entire websites. And it’s not just media types who are building things. As I wrote about earlier, my son built a custom CRM system for his company over one weekend. That kind of capability is impressive. It feels like something new and big is underway.

Which got me thinking. If we’re all hacking up these cool tools, how come we can’t share them with each other? Why are we all consigned to re-invent the wheel each time we want to build, say, a “Searchblog Query Engine“?

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Product, Platform, Interface, Medium, Language: What Is AI?

Thanks, Marshall.

What is AI?

I’ve been struggling with this rather basic question for several years now, so today I figured I’d write out loud about it, and see if anything coherent surfaces.

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Rebel, King, and Tyrant: Apple at 50

Wired, 1997: We were genuinely worried the company would go out of business.

Apple turns 50 years old tomorrow. I’ve been using its products for 48 of those years.

48 years. Over those five decades, my relationship with Apple has shifted as dramatically as its market cap. And not, I am afraid, in a good way.

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