OpenAI just put the final nail in the coffin of the open World Wide Web
This week OpenAI released a new offering called Operator. Operator is basically an AI agent that will browse the web for you. They weren't the first to do it, Anthropic released something called "computer use" a few months back, but with their brand recognition they've caused a stir. My take is that Operator is the beginning of the end for the open internet.
If you've been using ChatGPT as much as I have lately, you'll have noticed how much it has transformed how we access information. Previously if I wanted to know about the French Revolution, I would have Googled it, and likely landed on Wikipedia and maybe 2 or 3 specialty sites. Now, I just ask ChatGPT, and get far more specific answers. With their addition of "web search" I can now ask even more information I used to go to dedicated websites for, like "Who is winning the tennis?".
On the Operator release blog, OpenAI shows an example where they ask Operator to find the highest rated day tour in Rome on TripAdvisor, and then book it. This seems fairly innocuous and cool, remember how we used to do this? You'd have to Google for day tours, browse trip advisor, likely open a few of them, then book the tour. Now, Operator does it all for us and we don't even have to interact with the middle man.
The Death of the Middleman
Let's think about that - the middle man. Google, TripAdvisor, the tour providers - right now these are websites, and they support themselves by showing ads to users, or by partnering/commissions (e.g. TripAdvisor could receive revenue for directing users to day tours). With Operator, none of this is necessary. Google is no longer required. TripAdvisor can't support itself with ads, because nobody is looking. These models are about to become unsustainable.
It's interesting to wonder what this will mean for these services. TripAdvisor, for example, still has valuable IP in the user ratings it contains and the network of services it knows about. Rather than showing this via web, they may be forced to sell this directly to AI companies, or expose some kind of structured data feed that AI can access their information for a fee. In fact, there's many other services like this such as news websites, Yelp reviews, etc. These are useful sources of currently-relevant data, but they will no longer be able to viably support themselves via ads. I can see a future where we have some kind of structured-data layer with middlemen who sell this information to AI agents or something.
Who is telling me what to eat?
It also raises an interesting question about where we get quality human data, such as TripAdvisor reviews, in this new world. It's always been a challenge to find this on the internet. In the early days, it was on personal websites. Then, Google and SEO came along and we got so much blogspam people started turning to websites like TripAdvisor and Yelp. Then those eventually became difficult to access because they wanted to monetize their content, so if you were like me you probably found yourself adding "reddit" to the end of every Google query to get real human data. Now, I just ask the AI. The problem is that when we're all asking the AI, who is providing the answers? There's nowhere in ChatGPT for me to leave a review of a restaurant I just ate at. Maybe I could post it on Google reviews, but is that service even going to exist when their content is being freely harvested by people who aren't even looking at it, just getting Operator to fetch it for them?
Is this the end of the World Wide Web?
I think we're witnessing a fundamental shift in the usage patterns of the internet, and the economics are about to change drastically. We've already seen the first steps of it, when pretty much all major content sources started charging for API access to their websites (reddit, Twitter/X etc). I believe this pattern could continue, where we end up with two kinds of internet: Content that entertains, like YouTube, Netflix, some subreddits, will mostly remain the same - people want to point their eyeballs at that. For informational content, like Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Yelp, recipe websites... perhaps this will end up looking something like the journalism industry that aggregate and publish the information to AI companies, so they can avoid freeloading by agents.
Sadly I think the open web is about to die.
Addendum: Something else I think could happen as a result of this is a web where we verify user/client identities, the same way we currently verify server identities (via TLS certificates). The cost of running bots is plummeting. I could forsee a world where sites like Tripadvisor require a client certificate to connect. That certificate could be provided by paid services (to prevent bot spam), or maybe by device manufacturers like Apple, so you get one certificate per device to prevent bot spam. We'll see!