Google could steal the entire internet

Telegraph

7 days ago

Google has shown us what the end of the internet looks like. It calls it AI Mode. From Tuesday, instead of seeing ten blue links to third party websites when searching Google, users will see digests of information created by AI.
Google says this 'lets you ask nuanced questions that would have previously required multiple searches.' Sometimes there is value in these digests – as demonstrated by AI startup Perplexity.
However, the change has catastrophic economic consequences because of Google's dominant position over what we see on the web; AI mode removes the need to visit the site that created the original material. Google, it should be remembered, was found guilty of maintaining a monopoly by an American federal court last summer.
An analytics study last week suggested that the top ranking site in blue link Google loses 79 per cent of its traffic after AI summaries are introduced. Other surveys suggest even more: as much as 96 per cent.
This is not how the web was supposed to end. Sir Tim Berners Lee's original vision was of a rapid publishing technology, a two way conversation much like the telephone. When Google was young, it promised to get out of our way.
'We wanted people to spend a minimum amount of time on Google. The faster they got their results, the more they'd use it,' said founder Larry Page in 2004. But now Google has become like The Eagles' Hotel California – you can check in, but never leave.
That's in keeping with an extractive industry which takes much from publishing but gives little back. AI makes this an order of magnitude worse. Generative AI breaks an informal social contract that has existed since the dawn of business: that a buyer should take a keen interest in the health of its suppliers.
AI, though, is replacing suppliers entirely: an analogy is eating the seed corn. For having ingested everything from entire research libraries to newspapers, from YouTube to the works of every gallery, AI can create fine tuned pastiches and continue to produce them forever. Google can also punish sites that refuse to be scraped with a kind of corporate death sentence: making them disappear from Google.
A former Facebook engineer, Georg Zoeller, who also advises Asian governments on AI, says generative AI is little more than piracy disguised by hype. 'Large language models are just storage, and all they are doing is compressing knowledge,' he says. 'The industry would have been murdered in its crypt if it had told the truth, and people realised that on the other side of the bot is a Napster'. The magic trick is how AI disguises the theft.
Google says the old search results will still be available if you want – or can find them. Britain's Competition and Markets Authority has investigated the company's use of generative AI, but its remedies are so far very tentative, and it is soliciting views. The CMA also finds British business paying a very high toll to maintain Google's advertising dominance: UK publicly listed companies spend £10 billion with Google advertising, which the CMA suggests is far higher than it would be in a competitive digital ad market. The CMA can and should do much more to tame this predatory giant, so British internet businesses can survive.