Matthew Prince

I think the better outcome is one in which we say, fundamentally, some amount that you're paying for chat GPT, some amount that you're paying for whoever your AI agent is that's out there,

as it is giving you value from the content that is on the web, some amount of that fee or that revenue that the AI companies are generating, that should go back to the content creators.

And to me, that just seems like common sense.

If you think about it, though, like Google has been really one of the real good guys in the web ecosystem.

If Google hadn't created all of the monetization tools that we have, I think the web would be significantly smaller than it is today.

And so, yes, they have reaped significant rewards, but nobody has actually given back to the open web at the scale that Google has.

The irony, though, is that it's sort of like, you know, it's like a Marvel movie.

Whoever was, you know, the hero before becomes the villain, you know, in the next story.

And I think right now, Google is at a real inflection point.

where they are the ones who are actually saying, we are unwilling to pay for content in this new AI world because we've always gotten it for free.

But what's changed, what's changed is that in the past, when Google got the content for free, they gave something back, which was traffic.

Now Google is saying, we want to get the content still for free, but we're unwilling to actually give traffic back.

And again, it's not a willingness, it's actually the interface doesn't inherently give content back.

And so the force that really has to change in order to get this to happen is Google has to say the business model of yesterday isn't going to be the business model of the future.

Us being the patron of the web is still incredibly important.

And we and everyone else who are getting benefit from this for these AI engines that we're creating, we should actually be compensating content creators for that.

I'm actually optimistic.

that one, Google will come around to that perspective, either, you know, willingly or they'll be forced to.

But two, that when they do, that that will actually kind of, you know, be the thing that breaks through the dam and that we will see across the board AI companies say, yes, we want to do it.

Because,