Endgame for the Open Web

Anil Dash · 27 Mar 2026

Others here said this too

Whether the open web survives will be decided by what ordinary people collectively do, not by the companies that profit from it.

Their wordsWhether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months.

Also said by Molly White

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Anil Dash did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Whether the open web survives will be decided by what ordinary people collectively do, not by the companies that profit from it.

Their wordsWhether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months.
Our reading
The bargain that funded the open web was that a crawler could take your pages because it would send you readers; an AI crawler that sends nobody has broken it.
Mental modelIncentives

Their wordsThe deal was always simple: search engines had permission to crawl sites because they were going to be sending users to those sites. If they're hitting your site half a million times for every one user they send to your site, all they're giving you is higher costs.
Our reading
The web is being flooded with coherent, generic, generated text that buries the writing worth reading.
Mental modelValue moves to what stays scarce

Their wordsAs publishers see the danger from AI bots expand, they retreat to putting more and more content behind either password protection or payment walls or both, leaving the only publicly-accessible content to be AI-generated slop; open resources like research work, scientific analysis, and fair use of content all suffer as a result of people responding to the bad actors, since legitimate uses of open content are no longer possible.
Our reading
Closing off interoperability is how a platform locks people in, and that lock-in is what lets the service be made worse without losing them.
Mental modelLock-in and switching costs

Their wordsMeanwhile, others like Spotify and Netflix leverage their dominant positions in the market to coerce creators to abandon open podcasts entirely, in favor of proprietary formats that require listeners to be on those platforms — locking in both creators and their audiences so they are stuck as they begin the enshittification process.

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The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.