Ideas Weave Every Narrative with AI.
AI companies are scraping websites for free, forcing small site owners to pay for their bandwidth and compute. This hidden infrastructure tax is reshaping the web, locking out independent voices. The real battle isn’t over copyright—it’s about who pays for the servers.
Anubis uses proof-of-work to block AI scrapers, but it doesn’t stop well-funded AI companies — it only blocks independent developers, open-source tools, and hobbyists. The tool accelerates the death of the open web by handing a monopoly on data to the very entities it claims to fight.
Reddit’s move to require accounts on old.reddit.com isn’t a bug, but a deliberate strategy to kill anonymous browsing and force users into the trackable, ad-heavy new interface. It marks the death of the open web and the betrayal of the platform’s most loyal power users.
The EU Court of Justice just ruled that VPNs are ‘lawful technical tools’ in a landmark case about Anne Frank’s diary. But this isn’t just about copyright. It’s a crucial precedent that normalizes VPNs as essential infrastructure, pushing back against the creeping surveillance state and territorial geo-blocks that threaten the open web.
Zoom’s decision to restrict its web client to Chrome only isn’t a technical necessity—it’s a deliberate cost-cutting move that sacrifices user choice. By abandoning support for Safari and Firefox, Zoom is accelerating the erosion of the open web, forcing users into a single browser monoculture. This is a warning sign for every web-based service.
Reddit is quietly forcing account creation to access old.reddit.com, but this isn’t a UX glitch—it’s a calculated data capture strategy. Post-IPO, the platform is dismantling anonymous browsing to monetize user identities, betting that locked-in users won’t abandon the communities they built.
Publishers are blocking Google’s AI crawlers to survive, but the real cost is a broken open web. As premium content retreats behind paywalls, search results will degrade into a low-quality wasteland. The deal that made the internet work is dead—and the reader is the one left holding the bill.
Data from SiteStatsDB reveals GPTBot is the most blocked crawler among websites that drive organic traffic. This quiet rebellion—as creators lock out AI to protect their search traffic—is creating a severe data scarcity bottleneck. AI’s next crisis isn’t compute; it’s permission.