Do we want to work for Google for free?

[randahl@mastodon.social]

Do we want to work for Google for free?

I feared this day was coming — this is the first site I see closing down, because Google has stolen their content.

The owners of this cycling inspiration site asks: What is the reason to continue creating content, when Google just steals it and serves it as AI answers to keep all the traffic to itself?

It seems our EU politicians are soundly asleep at the bike handlebar.

https://www.holland-cycling.com/blog/321-holland-cycling-com-stops-in-2026

Via @saarmuller.

[winterschon@mastodon.bsd.cafe]

@randahl @tru @saarmuller

> The recent introduction of generative AI means that we no longer have any control over how big tech companies are using our information

Yeah, automated web spidering and page scraping has totally never been done before, and search engines have definitely never been cataloging and indexing and running analytics etc... until The AI came along and blah blah blah.

This is not the problem. Anyone who thinks that they ever had control over the content they placed online needs to wake up. Us old folks here may remember submitting our sites to search index queues, wanting our data to be spread across the internet for others (inc the search engines) to see and use and inspire.

But sure, blame The Algorithms (nevermind, this buzzword is from the last decade, now everyone blames AI like it's a monolithic problem (similar to the "fuck cars" lunatic fringe who ignore the facts).

People's illiberal policies and the flawed expectations on the content "owner's" side ... Those are the problem. Stop treating things like a monolithic issue and maybe look at the flawed expectations before blaming whatever buzzword is popular.