Thinking a lot about how we fund web browser development after re-visiting @robin's Web Infrastructure Search Endowment and stumbling on the minutes from the related TPAC discussion.
We know AI-based "search for me" like Arc Search threatens publisher and content creator revenue, but I wonder if anyone is writing/thinking about how AI search also threatens to alter browser funding? Maybe it doesn’t, but I have a hard time believing it won’t alter those economics.
@svoisen My theory is that it threatens not browser funding, but browsers. The writing on the wall is Chrome, and it's been observable for a time.
Over the years, Chrome has become less and less a browser (in the sense of a user agent for the web) and increasingly just the in-app webview for the Google universe. It's increasingly integrated with Google much more than with anything else.
@svoisen Google just reorged to put Android+Chrome+AI all under a single division — so we should expect this trend to continue.
Now, in an AI-centric worldview, you decreasingly need something messy like the web. Eventually, you can just license content from vetted providers and use that to drive an experience with your ads and your services, all hanging off of conversational interactions that limit interactions with anything else.
@svoisen One fun game to play to imagine that future is to use the web the way many Android users do, which is to say just through the Google Search app. When you visit a site in that, you're not really taken to Chrome, you're still in Search. The settings and behaviour are slightly different.
As far as I can tell the Chrome folks are in denial that they're digging their own grave. But then again, to work for Google is to be in denial in the first place.
This is what I found peculiar about Arc Search, which is emulating the same model. When I first saw Arc I thought it'd be another browser coming to drink from the search levy money firehose. But then they released something that completely undermines this future revenue stream.
So we start to approach a world where browsers are not user agents at all, just app windows in LLMs, and revenue potentially derives from a new levy on LLM traffic instead.
@svoisen I don't know if you saw Arc's video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIeJF3kL5ng. They are keenly aware that they're sacrificing their most likely revenue stream — what I'm curious to see is if they can come up with another.
Note, however, this dark future isn't the only one. There are alternatives, there are ways to make this work better. It won't come from Chrome because a good solution has to stop taking value out of the web and that would eliminate their margins, but there are options!
@robin I hadn't seen the video, thanks! We'll see what monetization strategy they come up with. Unlike Mozilla, they are design-driven and innovating rapidly, so if anyone could pull it off (premium subscription? teams-based product?) it’s The Browser Company (saying this as a former Mozillian who wants Mozilla to succeed).
I'm keen to see what better models we can come up with when LLM-based “search" is clearly going to remain in the mix.
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