After all the death of internet will be death of discovery on the web. Now we will have silos and walled garden with some agreements between them.
I would imagine the publishing industry to follow suit shortly and the academic knowledge discovery which was one of the core early reasons for the web to dissappear. And now we will lose much more than reddit reviews about products...etc.
I think this is another case where market forces does work but against the interests of the society. Usually when people say market forces work, they are right but don't specify in which direction and who benefits from that.
Search engine exclusivity is an insane idea and I think it will kill search engines if MS or whoever starts making deals with other big sites to block Google crawling. Imagine ads saying "Bing the Wall Street Journal today!" because it's exclusively on Bing, or only being able to access tech blogs in DuckDuckGo.
It isn't search engine exclusivity, so far as I see. I'm sure Reddit would welcome a big check from Microsoft or Apple, or even assurances the data will never be used for AI training.
It also doesn't seem to be about search engines, but just a side effect. It seems to be about publishers licensing their content for AI training data. I expect to see more money sprayed around from all the players, to head off lawsuits like the New York Times one.
If I were Microsoft I’d be thinking of investing some of my deep pockets into guaranteeing, for some sites, the lost revenue from losing the search placements.
If the news was saying “x many popular sites will no longer be available on anything but Bing”, that’s a lot more damaging to Google than the reverse is to Bing, because Google is the default for most people and it would shake confidence in them.
At this rate, robots.txt will be ignored by bots if it's not already.
Just like ads company completely ignoring Do Not Track because it's always set to deny / opt-out by the browser. It's already been fixed, but the damages is already done.
I would imagine the publishing industry to follow suit shortly and the academic knowledge discovery which was one of the core early reasons for the web to dissappear. And now we will lose much more than reddit reviews about products...etc.
I think this is another case where market forces does work but against the interests of the society. Usually when people say market forces work, they are right but don't specify in which direction and who benefits from that.