In 1989 — a year buzzing with the promise of freedom — Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the World Wide Web. The fall of the Berlin Wall was the physical embodiment of the breaking down of ideological barriers that had divided the world, and it echoed the hopes for liberty, fraternity and equality that had driven the French Revolution 200 years earlier.
The Web emerged into a world eager for openness and connection across divides, promising users freedom of information on an unprecedented scale. Almost four decades on, that hunger is fed by one company, Google, and it has begun to answer our questions rather than pointing us to where we can find the answers.
In the 1990s, going online through a beeping and screeching dial-up connection opened a world of niche microcosms of thought and experience. Ask Jeeves opened a portal that fed my creativity and hunger for knowledge — it was an era of slow loading times and uncurated authenticity.
Then we all learned to google. As Google prepared to go public in 2004, its founder, Larry Page, told shareholders, “We believe a well-functioning society should have abundant, free and unbiased access to high-quality information.” That was the idea, but the practice has turned out to be quite different.
Google undoubtedly transformed the way we accessed information. When I sat down to research my first book, Freedom to Think, in 2020 — on the history of and threats to our right to freedom of thought — the ability to search for and find obscure historical information and news, cases and laws from around the world was fundamental to my thinking process. The freedom of information Larry Page espoused is crucial to our ability to develop our thoughts and change our minds. The online environment already felt toxic, but search, although flawed, still worked.
In England, the process of enclosure over centuries allowed rich landowners to take common land from the people, changing both the landscape and society and leaving many hungry and poor in the name of efficiency and profit. The internet was once seen as a global information commons, but despite its founding principles, Google’s AI- powered search is choking the digital commons much more quickly and efficiently to the same effect.
Last year, Google billed its use of AI in Search as “going beyond information to intelligence.” AI Overview and the conversational interface supposedly make it easier for users to ask questions. But while it may be easier to ask questions, it is harder to get answers.
There have been some epic fails with Google Search's AI Mode, such as the suggestion to glue cheese to pizza. But the problems can be more subtle and insidious. When searching for a UK court case, Google’s AI Overview confidently told me I had got the name wrong, telling me I meant to look for a US case instead, on a completely different issue. All the search results below the overview pushed me to the US case. There was no way to look for the case I wanted. Google had decided I was looking for the wrong thing and there was no way around it.
As Google’s AI narrows the scope for search, it is, perversely, increasingly relied on by people as an oracle of truth. While the AI Overview provides some links to sources, according to Google, in 75 percent of cases, people do not bother to click through.
Clicks are the lifeblood of the internet. Without them, websites do not get revenue, and they lose their ability to keep renewing the high-quality, reliable information that feeds AI. Instead of the rich diet of diverse and organic content promised by the open internet’s founders, AI is turning the internet into the informational equivalent of a fast- food chain, with all of the health, economic and environmental consequences that entails.
Some researchers have estimated that AI search uses 30 times more energy than a standard search engine, making it clear that this trend may leave an arid wasteland in both the digital information commons and in the real world. If we don’t want that, Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon offer an alternative vision, “rewilding the internet” by drawing on lessons learned by ecologists to revitalize what they describe as an “extractive and fragile monoculture.”
AI search is a flashpoint in the evolution of the open internet. How we handle it will determine our future, and when looking for ideas about that future, we should ask the children who will inhabit it. When I asked my daughter and her friends what they thought about AI Mode in Google Search, they very patiently explained that they use Ecosia: it doesn’t give an AI summary unless you ask it to, and its profits go toward initiatives such as planting trees. There is hope. We may not be able to go back, but we can still choose how we go forward. Just don’t ask Google.
