Google, AI, Oligarchy and the End of the ‘Open Web’

I wanted to share a small observation about the interweaving worlds of AI, oligarchy, monopoly and – more distantly, but only a bit – autocracy. Over the years I’ve written regularly about the intersection of technology and journalism and the business models which underlie journalism. Because of TPM I had a front row seat to many key events, trends, dead ends and more in the evolution of the business of models of digital journalism over more than two decades. I’m not sure I knew more than anyone else, certainly lots of people knew more than me about the details of particular areas of knowledge. But I was up close and had a good view of the big picture. What set me apart somewhat was that there were very few people working so closely and obsessively with these evolving business models (a matter of pure necessity) who was also a full time writer. In any case, those of you who’ve been TPM Readers for many years will know a lot of that writing. (I have a post coming in the next few days which will add a new chapter to that, TPM’s place in those evolving or declining business models, and I hope you’ll take a moment to read it.)

About a decade ago I wrote a lot about Google’s evolving monopoly role in the advertising business. But what I always worked to keep front and center in that writing was that Google was significantly different from the other emerging platform monopolies in that its DNA and profit centers were built around the open internet. Facebook is a walled garden. It always was. Ideally it wanted you to spend every minute on Facebook. Apple was and is also a walled garden, albeit a more lovely one. Google’s DNA was different. Its wealth and power began with search. And search requires things you want to search for, which is to say other places to go besides Google websites. Now, in practice not everything Google did was just like this. But, big picture, this made Google a very different operation than Facebook, to cite one very big example. Its profound monopoly power in the digital advertising world grew directly out of its power in search. And even after that monopoly power was firmly entrenched its advertising business was heavily weighted toward non-Google websites subcontracting to Google the right to run its digital ads on those websites.

So, for instance, a site like TPM would say to Google, you can run ads you sell in these parts of our site. Over time, it was more and more Google selling those ads rather that other players selling them using Google’s ad architecture. (See the linked TPM post above for more details about what I’m talking about.) And as their monopoly power grew they took a bigger and bigger share of the money. But even then the whole operation was built on cutting substantial checks to a lot of websites every month. So even as Google was building its dominance over the advertising industry, grabbing up more and more of the money and undermining digital journalism business models it was also, simultanously, sustaining them with those checks. It was a complicated story. That again, very different from Facebook, which ran ads on its own site and kept every dime.

I try not to look at these things in moralizing terms. The difference was structural. Google’s first products were built on and required the open internet and that put the open internet in Google’s corporate DNA in a fundamental way.

Fast forward to today.

Google, like the other platform monopolies and a few newcomers like Anthropic and OpenAI (the so-called ‘hyperscalers’), are major players in and spenders on AI. You’ve no doubt noticed that nowadays when you Google something they start off with an AI-based answer to your question. On my phone I’ve noticed that that is the entirety of what I get and I actually have to X out the summary to get to search results. These summaries or answers can be hard to ignore because often they’re pretty useful. If I have a basic question, concrete and discrete, it can often answer it for me. I don’t like what they’re doing here. But like everyone else I’m busy and I’m usually not going to ignore the answer on principle when they’ve given me the answer I need.

I noticed just in the last few days (perhaps I only just noticed but I think it’s at least fairly new) that those summaries/answers now end with some conversational/folksy line that is something like, “What’s your next question?” or “Do you want me to go deeper on the information you’re trying to find?”

In other words, they’re trying to move the summary that leads the search results to something more like a closed loop chatbot conversation akin to what you do with ChatGPT or Claude. Or to put it more crisply, search is being used to launch what is really a new product which is very much like ChatGPT or Claude. I’ll say again, I’m not moralizing about this. I’ve found Claude very helpful and powerful and I recently became a subscriber to the Claude app which I now have on my iPhone. But there’s a big picture here that is important to recognize: Google is making a decisive move away from the open internet. They are building their own closed information garden and that’s a decisive shift away from the model that undergirded all of the company’s history down until the last couple years. Because Google is so big and has such a dominant role in architect of the internet that’s a decisive shift for the future of the internet as well.

This shift is already having devastating effects on digital journalism and all websites. Indeed, I’ll give Google credit. When I searched this question Google’s AI summary started with this sentence. “News websites are experiencing a severe, structural collapse in organic search traffic, primarily driven by search engines transforming into self-contained answer platforms via Artificial Intelligence (AI).” (The source link for that statement links to this.) For what it’s worth, this doesn’t have much impact on TPM because search was never a meaningful source of traffic or audience for us – that’s because of a mix of the ephemeral nature of most of what we publish (it’s old news in a few days or hours) combined with the fact that we simply never invested or focused much on search. But for the industry in general it’s a big, big, big deal.

Now, one could argue whether these two things are directly related. But they are certainly part of the same evolution. At first Big Tech’s move to the right was focused on Musk, Thiel, their circles and acolytes and then people like Mark Zuckerberg who saw the MAGA light leading up to the 2024 presidential election. But recently Google cofounder Sergei Brin has moved decisively in the MAGA direction as well. He’s not in the full white nationalist shit-posting mold of Elon Musk. At least not yet. But it’s a big shift away from the image, political giving and political culture Google’s founder-leaders had for most of the company’s history. Brin’s big hobbyhorse is funding opposition to a California wealth tax and in a move both to avoid those taxes and as kind of a MAGA signifier he recently relocated to just across the California border, set up his new home on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe.

Everyone has their own particular political evolution. With Brin it’s some part wealth taxes, some part the trend in his billionaire social circle, some (fairly cringey) part a succession of MAGA trophy girlfriends and wives. At the end of the day though he is part of a simpler, truistic story: the fantastically rich, who derive their wealth from entrenched monopolies tend to be on or migrate to the right.

Which brings me to a final point. There’s a long, complex and mostly inconclusive literature in the history of technology over whether particular technologies have an inherent politics embedded within them – some more liberationist or autocratic. I’m not going to settle that question here and I’m not sure it has any fundamental answer. Suffice it to say that in the here and now and in the real world the issue with AI isn’t necessarily AI itself so much as the fact that AI is being introduced, one might say forcibly injected into our society under the control of a handful of centibillionaires whose wealth is based on entrenched platform monopolies and who increasingly see control over the state and its regulatory powers as critical to the perpetuation of their wealth. In that sense what I’ve described above is unsurprising and all part of the same story of the increasing marriage of extreme wealth, Big Tech, AI and the coalescing American oligarchy which is allied with the political forces of autocracy.