Google has plunged the internet into a “spiral of decline”, the co-founder of the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) lab has claimed.
Mustafa Suleyman, the British entrepreneur who co-founded DeepMind, said: “The business model that Google had broke the internet.”
He said search results had become plagued with “clickbait” to keep people “addicted and absorbed on the page as long as possible”.
Information online is “buried at the bottom of a lot of verbiage and guff”, Mr Suleyman argued, so websites can “sell more adverts”, fuelled by Google’s technology.
I figure it’s like cable companies. They get you hooked with a low price that puts the squeeze on competitors, then slowly jack up the fees on existing customers. It’s a safe bet when peer companies are also raising prices because where can the customers jump ship to that isn’t the exact same enshittified service? Plus, if there’s a series they’ve got you hooked on, are you going to want to leave or just rationalize that nobody else is better?
IMO we’re going to see more “subscribe for [extended time period]” and save $2/mo or maybe even timed contracts with abusive cancellation fees to keep customers on the hook.