Recently, at its big annual developer conference, Google announced the most significant overhaul of search in its history. It's rebuilding the search box around AI: conversational queries, an "AI Mode" that answers follow-up questions, and agents that gather information for you in the background.That announcement set off a wave of commentary about the death of the "ten blue links" — the idea that search is no longer a ranked list of websites you click through to, but a conversation with a chatbot and answers delivered directly. For many, it’s a fundamental reshaping of how the internet works.

So what does it mean for the people who actually make the stuff on the web—publishers, creators, anyone who depends on being found? They've already been bemoaning steep drops in traffic from AI-powered search that answers a user's question without ever sending them to the source. And with that lost traffic goes the advertising and the subscriptions that pay for the work in the first place. 

Predictably, many are waxing nostalgic about the good old days of the open web. But were those days actually so good? People have been griping about this bargain for years: that Google scraped their content without paying, that it kept users on its own page, that it became an ad-tech monopoly sitting in the middle of every transaction. And at the same time, the AI companies argue they could never have built these tools, now used by hundreds of millions of people, without access to the open web. For better or worse, ChatGPT probably doesn't exist if the web had been a closed, permissioned, pay-to-read place from the start. 

So what should the norms be going forward? When AI crawlers put enormous strain on a site like Wikipedia, who should pay for that? If the old handshake between the people who make content and the companies that index it is eroding, what should the new one look like, and how do we even get there? Do we write new rules, or does this whole thing just stay tied up in court for the next decade?

Evan is joined by Derek Slater, a founding partner of Proteus Strategies. He spent fifteen years at Google where he built and ran the firm’s information-policy team. Before that, he worked at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Harvard's Berkman Center. He's an expert on all these issues, and has long advocated for the freedom to access and learn from information on the web.

Read some of Derek’s work here:

• “AI Training, the Licensing Mirage, and Effective Alternatives to Support Creative Workers,” in Tech Policy Press
• “Worried About AI Monopoly? Embrace Copyright’s Limits,” in Lawfare