A plan to enclose the public Web
The Web is a public commons made of links. There is stuff at those links, almost all of it open to everybody, by design.
The main way we see and use that stuff is with a browser. But what if your browser has AI of its own, and that AI stands between you and what’s at those links? Your Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or DuckDuckGo browser won’t just fetch and display pages. It will interpret, summarize, filter, and answer, using whatever AI its maker chooses to provide. And those AIs, even if they operate locally rather than in distant data centers, still come from silo’d vendors.
That’s one of the issues raised by Google’s Prompt API, which Mozilla opposes. As The Register puts it, “Mozilla fears wiring an AI API into Chrome will make the web less open.”
Think about what happens when browsers become AI intermediaries rather than ways to access sources directly. Imagine Chrome relying on Gemini, Firefox on Claude, Safari on Apple Intelligence, and DuckDuckGo on ChatGPT.
In that world, your browser becomes an interpreter of the Web rather than a way to navigate it. What was once primarily a world of links increasingly becomes inventory for competing AI systems. The Web remains underneath, but no longer as a place through which you browse and surf from source to source. Instead, it becomes a substrate from which AI systems gather, summarize, and present information.
If that happens, it’s a form of enclosure. The commons will still exist, but access to it will be mediated by private systems operated by a handful of vendors. That’s the danger here.
Don’t just say what. Say who.
Indiana University layoffs:
None of those stories name the persons laid off, which is what readers will most want to know. Yes, I can see why. But stories need characters.
Leave a Reply