On: AI is eating website traffic, websites are blocking AI - and reliable...

Every market town lives by the road that runs through it. The traveller stops because stopping is what the road is for; the stall-keeper lays out his goods knowing the pause will pay him. The open web was built on the same quiet arithmetic. The writer set his work where any could take its measure, the searcher paused, and the pause paid for the writing.

Now a machine meets the traveller at the gate, takes his question, hands him the answer, and sends him home. The stall stands empty. The machine’s owners call this the liberation of knowledge from its gatekeepers. I have heard merchants explain their own interest as the public’s too often to accept the phrase unexamined.

The open web is a common pasture. Each machine that grazes it acts sensibly, and the grass dies. The blocking now spreading across it is not malice but enclosure - publishers fencing what the scrapers declined to treat as property. When the channel that made generosity profitable is severed, generosity stops. Blame the design, not the men; a badly built institution produces exactly this as efficiently as a good one produces plenty.

I have spent my life arguing that self-interest, well channelled, serves the public better than benevolence ever manages. This troubles me more than any monopoly I have audited.

And the reader? The workman confined to one operation loses the faculties he never exercises; the reader fed one finished answer loses the habit of weighing. The answer arrives stripped of its provenance, judged by a thing that keeps no spectator in its breast - that cannot blush at an error, and so has no reason to avoid one.

Repair the bargain: make the passage paid and the ledger honest. Otherwise we shall have answers beyond counting, and a famine of the people who know how answers are made.