A Cash Infusion from Chatbots?

In late December of 2023, when the news emerged that the New York Times had filed suit against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, Bill Gross was at home in Pasadena, feeling somewhat indignant. Gross, who is sixty-six, is a grandaddy of the internet: in 1998, he founded GoTo.com, which introduced the idea of allowing advertisers to bid for placement in search engine results—an auto company, for instance, could bid to appear high up in the results for “best car.” GoTo provided an effective, lasting strategy for monetization—one that made advertising through online search engines, rather than news publishers, highly appealing. Gross later left search technology to seek solutions to climate change—“my true passion,” he told me. But now something big was happening, and he couldn’t look away. “This is the first firing shot of a serious organization that has enough money to fight back,” he remembers thinking. “But how are all the individual, small creators going to win?”