Web use is hard to measure, but by one estimate monthly traffic from search engines has fallen by 15% in the past year. Some of the loudest complaints have come from the news media, an industry in which we acknowledge an interest. But the drought is a wider problem. Science and education sites have lost a tenth of their visitors in the past year. Reference sites are down by 15% and health sites by 31%. Some big names are being gutted: Tripadvisor.com, which recommends the best hotels or beaches, is down by a third; Webmd, which offers reassurance (or alarm) to the poorly, has fallen by half.

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As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for ai to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with ai companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. (The Economist Group has yet to license its work for ai training, but has agreed to let Google use select articles for one of its ai services.) Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.

No one should expect the web of the future to look just as it does today. ai-powered search will rightly shake up some services: business directories, for instance, face disintermediation as answer-bots field queries such as “emergency plumber” or “houses for sale”. But the evaporation of incentives to create content presents a fundamental problem. If human traffic is drying up, the web will need a new currency

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Bringing a new business model to the web is daunting; it may take a shove from regulators to get started. Yet everyone has an interest in making content-creation pay. Publishers may be the ones complaining now, but if the content tap dries up, ai companies will suffer, too. Some are more vulnerable than others. Whereas Meta can draw on data posted to its social networks and Google owns YouTube, the world’s biggest video vault, Openai relies entirely on others for its content.

If nothing changes, the risk is of a modern-day tragedy of the commons. The shared resource of the open web will be over-exploited, leading to its eventual exhaustion. If that process is not stopped, one of the great common properties of humanity could be gravely diminished. The tragedy of the web would be a tragedy for everyone.

As others have commented, the economist is presenting this as a capitalist issue that requires a monetary fix. The most ironic element to me is that one of the elements of the tragedy of the commons is that is indicates the requirement of a public interest and it's regulatory interest so the commons can work. So another way to perceive this is that we need a non-capital framework to allow the web to persist. Say perhaps like roads are created as infrastructure to allow the free movement of it's citizens in a "safe" and organized way, perhaps we should change our perspective on the utility of the we and it's content. I'm not suggesting that we copy the transportation to the internet as it obviously breaks down, but the need to think outside the capitalist box is apparent. Libraries have been funded both publicly and privately as public interest, and have the capacity to work both for and nonprofit. This adaptation need not just be 'free' market driven. Especially as we do not actually live in a free market, but I'll let others drive down that hole.