The “web’s business model” doesn’t have to be the web’s business model. Advertising was the Original Sin of the Internet and the source of its enshittification.

The main issue is that nobody is going to want to create new content when they get paid nothing or almost nothing for doing so.

This is the whole reason copyright is supposed to exist. Content creators get exclusive control over the content they create for the duration of the copyright, so they can make a living off of work that then enriches society. And for the further benefit of society, after 14 years this copyright ends and the works become public domain, where anyone can create derivative works that will have copyright on them going to their own creators and the cycle continues, further enriching society.

Large companies first perverted this by getting Congress to extend the duration of copyright to truly absurd levels so they could continue to extract wealth from works they had to spend very little to maintain (mostly lawyers to enforce their copyrights). Since only they could create derivative works for 100(!) years, they did not have to compete with other creators in society, giving themselves a monopoly on what become cultural icons. Now corporate America has found a way to subvert creation itself, but it requires access to effectively all copyrighted works everywhere simultaneously. So now they just ignore the copyright, since it is impeding their wealth accumulation.

And so now the creative engine copyright is supposed to foster dies, taking the social enrichment it was designed to facilitate with it. People won’t stop making art or generating what’s supposed to be copyrighted works, but when they can’t making a living on it, they have to turn it into a hobby and spend the bulk of their time and energy on work that will put food on the table.

To be fair, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Because the current business model is mass surveillance, selling people’s data, harvesting every tiny bit of user attention and manipulate them, making everything an outrage, confining people into filter bubbles, endless annoyances and enshittification… I wouldn’t make me super sad if that were to die… So if it’s just the title… go ahead. Sadly there is more to the story. And also Cloudflare isn’t exactly healthy for the internet. (And their bot detection doesn’t work very well in practice.)

Google has become pretty much useless. If I want to search for something I start with chatGPT or Claude and just ask for relevant links. The summaries they give are ok but not nearly that accurate. Hence always asking for links. As of now, it bypasses the optimized cruft Google’s first page of search results has turned into.