<
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/08/were-walling-off-the-open-internet-to-stop-ai-and-it-may-end-up-breaking-everything-else/>
"A longtime open internet activist recently asked me whether I’d reversed my
position on internet openness and copyright because of AI. The question caught
me off guard—until I realized what he was seeing. Across the tech policy world,
people who spent decades fighting for an open, accessible internet are now
cheering as that same internet gets locked down, walled off, and restricted.
Their reasoning? If it hurts AI companies, it must be good.
This is a profound mistake that threatens the very principles these advocates
once championed.
There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about LLM/AI tools these days, in
terms of how they can be overhyped, how they can be misused, and certainly over
who has power and control over the systems. But it’s deeply concerning to me
how many people who supported an open internet and the fundamental principles
that underlie that have now given up on those principles because they see that
some AI companies might benefit from an open internet.
The problem isn’t just ideological—it’s practical. We’re watching the
construction of a fundamentally different internet, one where access is
controlled by gatekeepers and paywalls rather than governed by open protocols
and user choice. And we’re doing it in the name of stopping AI companies, even
though the real result will be to concentrate even more power in the hands of
those same large tech companies while making the internet less useful for
everyone else."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
