I feel like it’s really hard to be optimistic about the state of the internet. While some more technologically and politically conscious users might make different choices, 99% of the people will just keep using Google and following along whatever changes they make.
The shift to AI-generated defaults effectively replaces user agency with opaque model outputs, obscuring the provenance of information rather than just altering its format. This centralization of search logic into a single proprietary pipeline creates a single point of failure for truth verification, making decentralized, transparent search protocols increasingly critical for maintaining an open web.