Matthew Prince

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,

Almost every single AI company that I talk to says, of course, we should be paying for content, but it needs to be a level playing field.

It needs to be something where if we're paying, Google has to pay too.

And so once we get Google to say, yes, we're willing to pay, I actually think that we might actually unlock a huge new business model for the web and for content creators and potentially unlock really a new golden age of content creation.

I mean, Google, of course, is one of the players.

Absolutely.

But I think that what's optimistic to me

If you sort of understand what the incentives are, I think that the incentives of this new model may lead us to an Internet that all of us would like better than the Internet that we have today.