AI is breaking the internet’s traffic-for-content bargain

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 46:47

   call it the covenant the internet's covenant which is sort of a deal between a deal between the distribution side of the internet google facebook and so forth and the content side you know news sites travel sites whatever it might be um you think about google like the idea was you kind of give google a snippet let them index you and then they'll send you some clicks right That started to break, like, maybe last decade.

2. 47:10

   But particularly now, you go to Google, you get an answer, right? You get, you know, more and more, you're sort of, the social networks are trying to keep you on there, not linking out. And what that does is it has downstream effects, right? It means that the websites that make money on ads and conversions and other things can no longer do that. I think that's probably going to, you know, you see the early signs of this, like, you know, Stack Overflow and some other websites where the traffic dropped precipitously when you had sort of AI replacements. And so, you know, but like people will still be booking traffic. Like maybe they won't go, maybe your agent will go to the travel website or maybe, you know, some other, you know, you'll get a recipe in some other way. People will still get these things.

3. 47:51

   But, you know, many of these transactions will still happen. They just won't happen in the way they were happening. And so that the negative is it's painful in the near term. And there's a bunch of businesses that are built on the sort of human attention economy that will have challenges. I think on the entrepreneur side, there's a chance to rethink these things from first principles and say, okay, what does a better internet look like?

4. 48:11

   You know, an internet where people are empowered with, you know, AI and everything else and want to do things and how do we kind of reorganize it? So I think this is going to happen over the next, let's call it decade. Is you're going to have sort of this kind of great reconfiguration of the Internet and how the economics work, how the attention flows, how knowledge is shared, how people produce things together, collaborate, how organizations interact over the Internet.

5. 48:39

   So, I don't know, it feels in a way that I feel like mobile didn't have that kind of impact. mobile obviously you know i think you know made the internet go from whatever 500 million to 5 billion people and increased engagement and a bunch of other things you know empowered people with all the information in their pocket had a lot of good effects but this is something that's much more dramatic i think in the way it will it will reshape things and you know so i think there's a lot of also you know it'll be some somewhat painful and for some but i think it'll also be a lot of opportunity on that note just because we're talking about mobile do you have any predictions or things you're excited about as it relates to computing or devices or sort of form