Google Declaring War on the Web

Source: Hacker News

Google’s “war on the Web” announced at I/O

In yesterday’s I/O keynote, Google declared war on the remnants of the Web. A longer description is available on their site — see the official blog post.

TL;DR: Google is pushing Search further into the “here’s your processed answer” direction that AI Overviews have established—those AI snippets in current Search that are wrong about 10 % of the time. In effect, they are mostly giving up on the paradigm of providing links to information.

De‑contextualising information

While the announcement is wrapped in “AI” talk and “agentic” hype, the approach removes links to sources and instead produces LLM‑generated responses. This creates a new abstraction layer on the Web. Where Zuckerberg’s Metaverse failed, Google is starting the next attack: your website, your work no longer matters. The Web is being hidden behind a Google‑controlled surface, beyond even their browser monopoly.

Your work, writing, or art still matters a bit—as (unpaid) raw material for their synthetic text extruders. You work for free so Google can tightly control the flow of information and ensure the responses people get align with what they want them to be. But your work is no longer seen as an important cultural artifact you can share with others.

A revolution against the participatory Web

This is a literal revolution against the participatory Web, against us. The goal is to take away the Web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it—an abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolising access to information, a true Metaverse unbound by open standards and your ability to build your own corner of the Web according to your needs and desires. Given how strong Google’s influence is on Web standards, this will change the shape of the standards for the technological landscape we are building the Web on.

The next step may be Google—or other companies in that space—developing and deploying a new derogatory term for the Web, marking it as unclean, unruly, dangerous, or bad (similar to “the Dark Web”), and presenting their abstraction as the “safe” Web.

What you can do

If you care about the Web and people’s ability to participate in it as more than passive consumers, this needs to be taken seriously. De‑googlifying your mental apparatus becomes more urgent today. Consider:

• Using alternative search engines.
• Avoiding the Chrome browser.
• Preventing a slopified AOL‑type environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant.

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