The Agentic Web and Original Sin

Summary

Summarized wtih ChatGPT

The internet grew using ads because it lacked built-in payment systems, which made content free but hurt quality. New ideas like Microsoft’s agentic web could change this by letting AI agents act for users and support paid content. This shift may create a better marketplace for creators and improve the web’s future.

Key takeaways:

1. The ad model helped the web grow but has limits for quality and sustainability.
2. Native payments and AI agents can enable a new, fairer web economy.
3. Openness and competition are vital to avoid a web controlled by a few big companies.

Highlights from Article

I think the original sin was we couldn’t actually build economics, which is to say money, into the core of the internet and so therefore advertising became the primary business model…

This last point is at the crux of why many ad-based newspapers will find it all but impossible to switch to a real subscription business model. When asking people to pay, quality matters far more than quantity, and the ratio matters: a publication with 1 valuable article a day about a well-defined topic will more easily earn subscriptions than one with 3 valuable articles and 20 worthless ones covering a variety of subjects. Yet all too many local newspapers, built for an ad-based business model that calls for daily content to wrap around ads, spend their limited resources churning out daily filler even though those ads no longer exist.

• Users will pay for fewer but better content. Advertisers might not.

he key difference from the 1990s is that on the agentic web native digital payments are both viable and the best possible way to not only keep the web alive, but also in the process create better and more useful AI.

• Without some tmie of better micropayments, the incentive to create good content will drop.

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