Decentralized Systems Will Be Necessary To Stop Google From Putting The Web Into Managed Decline
Is Google signaling the end of the open web? That’s some of the concern raised by its new embrace of AI. While most of the fears about AI may be overblown, this one could be legit. But it doesn’t mean that we need to accept it.
These days, there is certainly a lot of hype and nonsense about artificial intelligence and the ways that it can impact all kinds of industries and businesses. Last week at Google IO, Google made it clear that they’re moving forward with what it calls “AI overviews,” in which Google’s own Gemini AI tech will try to generate answers at the top of search pages.
All week I’ve been hearing people fretting about this, sharing some statement similar to Kevin Roose at the NY Times asking if the open web can survive such a thing.
In the early days, Google’s entire mission was to get you off their site as quickly as possible. In a 2004 interview with Playboy magazine that was later immortalized in a regulatory filing with the SEC (due to concerns of them violating quiet period restrictions), Larry Page famously made clear that their goal was to quickly help you find what you want and send you on your way:
PLAYBOY: With the addition of e-mail, Froogle—your new shopping site—and Google news, plus your search engine, will Google become a portal similar to Yahoo, AOL or MSN? Many Internet companies were founded as portals. It was assumed that the more services you provided, the longer people would stay on your website and the more revenue you could generate from advertising and pay services.
PAGE: We built a business on the opposite message. We want you to come to Google and quickly find what you want. Then we’re happy to send you to the other sites. In fact, that’s the point. The portal strategy tries to own all of the information.
PLAYBOY: Portals attempt to create what they call sticky content to keep a user as long as possible.
PAGE: That’s the problem. Most portals show their own content above content elsewhere on the web. We feel that’s a conflict of interest, analogous to taking money for search results. Their search engine doesn’t necessarily provide the best results; it provides the portal’s results. Google conscientiously tries to stay away from that. We want to get you out of Google and to the right place as fast as possible. It’s a very different model.
PLAYBOY: Until you launched news, Gmail, Froogle and similar services.
PAGE: These are just other technologies to help you use the web. They’re an alternative, hopefully a good one. But we continue to point users to the best websites and try to do whatever is in their best interest. With news, we’re not buying information and then pointing users to information we own. We collect many news sources, list them and point the user to other websites. Gmail is just a good mail program with lots of storage.
Ah, how times have changed. And, of course, there is an argument that if you’re just looking for an answer to a question, giving you that answer directly can and should be more efficient, rather than pointing you to a list of places that might (or might not) have that answer.
But, not everything that people are searching for is just “an answer.” And not everything that is an answer takes into account the details, nuances, and complexities of whatever topic someone might be searching on.
There’s nothing inherent to the internet that makes the “search to get linked somewhere else” model have to make sense. Historically, that’s how things have been done. But if you could have an automated system simply give you directly what you needed at the right time, that would probably be a better solution for some subset of issues. And, if Google doesn’t do it, someone else will, and that would undermine Google’s market.
But still, it sucks.
Google’s search has increasingly become terrible. And it appears that much of that enshittification is due to (what else?) an effort to squeeze more money out of everyone, rather than providing a better service.
In Casey Newton’s writeup of the new “AI Overviews” feature, he notes that it may be a sign that “the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline.”
Still, as the first day of I/O wound down, it was hard to escape the feeling that the web as we know it is entering a kind of managed decline. Over the past two and a half decades, Google extended itself into so many different parts of the web that it became synonymous with it. And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself.
I had actually read this article the day it came out, but I didn’t think too much of that paragraph until a couple days later at a dinner full of folks working on decentralization. Someone brought up that quote, though paraphrased it slightly differently, claiming Casey was saying that Google was actively putting the web into managed decline.
Whether or not that’s very different (and maybe it’s not), both should spark people to realize that this is a problem.
And it’s one of the reasons I am still hoping that people will spend more time thinking about solutions that involve decentralization. Not necessarily because of “search” (which tends to be more of a centralized tool by necessity), but because the world of decentralized social media could offer an alternative to the world in which all the information we consume is intermediated by a single centralized player, whether it’s a search engine like Google, or a social media service like Meta.
For the last few years, there have been stories trying to remind people that Facebook is not the internet. But that’s because, for some people, it kinda has been. And the same is true of Google. For some people, their online worlds exist either in social media or in search as the mediating forces in their lives. And, obviously, there are all sorts of reasons why that happens, but it should be seen as a much less fulfilling kind of internet.
The situation discussed here, where Google is trying to give people full answers via AI, rather than sending them elsewhere on the web, may well be “putting the web into managed decline,” but there’s no reason we have to accept that future.
The various decentralized social media systems that have been growing over the past few years offer a very different potential approach: one in which you get to build the experience you want, rather than the one a giant company wants. If you need information, others on the decentralized social network can help you find it or respond to your questions.
It’s a much more social experience, mediated by other people, perhaps on different systems, rather than a single giant company determining what you get to see.
The promise of the internet, and the World Wide Web in particular, was that anyone could build their own world there, connected with others. It was a world that wasn’t supposed to be in any kind of walled garden. But, many people have ended up in just a few of those walled gardens.
It’s no secret why: they do what they do pretty damn well, and certainly better than what was around before. People became reliant on Google search because it was much better. They became reliant on Facebook because it was an easy way to keep up with your family and friends. But in giving those companies so much control, we’ve lost some of that promise of the open web.
And now we can take it back. Whether it’s using ActivityPub/Mastodon, or Bluesky/ATProtocol (or others like nostr or Farcaster), we’re starting to see users building out an alternative vision that isn’t just mediated by single companies with Wall Street demands pushing them to enshittify.
No one’s saying to give up using Google, because it’s necessary for many. But start to think about where you spend your time online, and who is looking to lock you in vs. who is giving you more freedom to have the world that works best for you.