{"slug": "ai-didnt-break-the-web-the-dotcons-did-ai-just-turned-up-the-volume", "title": "AI didn’t break the web. The dotcons did – AI just turned up the volume", "summary": "AI scraping did not break the web; the dotcom-era platforms did by hollowing out the open web's social norms of reciprocity and trust over decades, according to an analysis from an open web perspective. The early web was governed by social accountability and sharing, not intellectual property enforcement, and AI simply accelerates the extraction and enclosure logic that platforms already established. The real challenge is not strengthening copyright walls but rebuilding social and technical spaces where contribution and community governance can thrive again.", "body_md": "This toot is a diagnosis of a small shift, but thinking it’s trapped inside a narrow, liberal property lens on what the internet is and was supposed to be. What’s being described as a “split” between a Free-For-All quarry and gated communities is what happens when you assume the web was primarily about enforceable intellectual property contracts in the first place. That framing already accepts the [#dotcons](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/dotcons/) worldview – that value is created by ownership, extraction, and legal enclosure.\n\nFrom an [#openweb](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/openweb/) and [#OMN](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/omn/) perspective, that was never the path. The early web (and the cultures that fed into it – FOSS, mailing lists, blogs, wikis) wasn’t held together by copyright enforcement. It was held together by norms: reciprocity, attribution, sharing, trust, and rough social accountability. That’s much closer to the #4opens than to IP law. Open code, open standards, open data, open process – not because the law enforced fairness, but because social relations did.\n\nWhat [#AI](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/ai/) scraping has broken is not a legal equilibrium, but a fragile social one that the [#dotcons](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/dotcons/) had already been hollowing out for decades. They didn’t rely on “fair use” or reciprocity – they relied on enclosure, centralisation, and extraction, [#AI](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/ai/) simply accelerates that logic. So yes, “anything reachable by HTTP becomes fuel” is accurate – but the mistake is thinking the alternative is stronger copyright walls or more contractual gating, that deepens enclosure. The split you describe is real, but it’s not new, and it’s not caused by [#AI](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/ai/), it’s the endpoint of a long enclosure of commons → platform capture ([#dotcons](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/dotcons/)), trust → contracts, sharing → surveillance + monetisation and public space → login walls.\n\nThe current AI mess is not the origin of this, it’s just a new layer of extraction sitting on top of the [#mainstreaming](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/mainstreaming/) mess. From an [#OMN](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/omn/) view, the interesting question isn’t how to reassert IP over scraping. It’s how to rebuild social and technical spaces where contribution, context, and reciprocity matter again – where value isn’t just extracted but circulated in ways communities can govern.\n\nAI is not an existential threat to the [#openweb](https://hamishcampbell.com/tag/openweb/), it’s an asshole amplifier inside an already broken system. The real loss we need to compost isn’t only copyright protection, it’s the erosion of the social commons that made openness meaningful in the first place.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-didnt-break-the-web-the-dotcons-did-ai-just-turned-up-the-volume", "canonical_source": "https://hamishcampbell.com/ai-didnt-break-the-web-the-dotcons-did-ai-just-turned-up-the-volume/", "published_at": "2026-06-04 12:50:07+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-05 14:17:19.757525+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy"], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-didnt-break-the-web-the-dotcons-did-ai-just-turned-up-the-volume", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-didnt-break-the-web-the-dotcons-did-ai-just-turned-up-the-volume.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-didnt-break-the-web-the-dotcons-did-ai-just-turned-up-the-volume.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/ai-didnt-break-the-web-the-dotcons-did-ai-just-turned-up-the-volume.jsonld"}}