"Speaking at a Fortune Brainstorm Tech panel held earlier this month on the future of discovery, titled "Search Engine Zero," Prince outlined a growing crisis for content creators, arguing the internet's fundamental business model is breaking. The shift from search engines to AI-powered "answer engines" is decimating the web traffic that has historically funded publishers, potentially leading to a future where a handful of tech billionaires become Medici-like patrons and gatekeepers of knowledge."
"This marks a radical departure, Prince added, from much of the history of the web, where Google has been "the great patron" of the internet. "The web has never been free," he argued. "Someone has always paid for it." Google's search engine acted as a "treasure map," he said, sending traffic to content creators, who then monetized that traffic. Prince explained that this system, which itself represented a radical departure from traditional print media business models, is now collapsing."
The shift from search engines to AI-powered 'answer engines' is decimating web traffic that historically funded publishers and content creators. The traditional model, where search directed users to monetizable pages, is collapsing, ending Google's role as the primary traffic patron. Without replacement revenue, media outlets and research institutions face severe financial stress and potential closure. Concentration of content distribution and curation may enable a few AI leaders or tech billionaires to act as Medici-like patrons and gatekeepers of knowledge. This scenario risks a dystopian rollback to a pre-Renaissance media landscape with centralized control over information flow and access.
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