Endgame for the Open Web

This is a sobering but necessary reminder that the open web’s current crisis is not theoretical; it’s already playing out across publishing, open source, standards, and shared infrastructure.

I appreciate how clearly Anil connects dots that too many people are still treating as separate problems. This isn’t just about AI summaries siphoning traffic from publishers or slop code drowning maintainers or bad actors ignoring long-standing norms like robots.txt. It’s all of those things at once. The through-line is extraction: taking value from open systems without giving anything back, then undermining the very ecosystems that made that extraction possible in the first place.

The good of the web only exists because of the openness of the web. They can’t just keep on taking and taking without expecting people to finally draw a line and saying “enough”.

If you care about the web as a public good, this post is worth your time.