About Code & Consequence#
I'm excited to share that I've started a new newsletter on LinkedIn called Code & Consequence. The premise is simple but critical: the technical decisions we make today in AI, engineering, and infrastructure don't exist in isolation—they ripple through entire business ecosystems, often in ways we don't anticipate.
As someone who has spent years decades building digital teams, products & services, I have a front row seat to experience how rapidly the landscape is shifting. Traditional assumptions about how technology functions, how businesses operate online, and what competitive advantages look like are being challenged daily.
This newsletter connects those dots—to bridge the gap between technical innovation and business reality. Each edition will explore a specific technology trend or decision and examine its broader implications for business strategy, market dynamics, and competitive positioning.
The inaugural post tackles something I've been thinking about extensively: the fundamental breakdown of the web's economic model and what it means for every business that depends on online content and traffic. Enjoy.
The End of the Web as We Know It: Why Every Business Leader Needs to Prepare for the Great Content Lockdown#
The internet's most successful business model just died. Here's what that means for your business strategy.
For over two decades, we've operated under a simple assumption: if you build valuable content and make it accessible, people will come to your website, engage with your brand, and potentially convert into customers. This model has powered everything from advertising revenue to subscription businesses, creating the "open web" we've all come to know and rely upon.
The Cracks Begin to Show
But over the last 5 or so years, this foundational agreement has been steadily deteriorating. Google's introduction of answer boxes began extracting information directly into search results, cutting out the original creators. Then came the "cookie apocalypse" – Safari's aggressive deprecation of third-party cookies, followed by Chrome's plans to do the same – which dramatically reduced the value of each visitor as revenue per impression plummeted.
Publishers haven't sat idle watching their business models crumble. The industry's response has been swift and increasingly aggressive: ubiquitous registration walls, multiplying paywalls and subscription models, proliferating newsletters, and dramatically increased ad loads. These measures often impact user experience but represent desperate attempts to maintain revenue with fewer, less valuable impressions.
These aren't isolated incidents – they're symptoms of a fundamental breakdown in the web's economic foundation that defined the internet for a generation.
The AI Death Blow: When Content Extraction Went Industrial#
November 2022 marked the "ChatGPT moment", when AI-powered content consumption went mainstream. Since then, we've witnessed an explosion of summarisation services that don't just extract snippets; they synthesise entire answers from multiple sources, often eliminating any need for users to visit original source websites.
The scale is breathtaking. OpenAI recently reported $12 billion in annualised revenue, largely built on content that others created and published freely. These AI services function as intelligent answer engines, ingesting vast amounts of web content into their training corpora, then generating responses that synthesise insights from countless sources, whilst the original creators receive no traffic or compensation.
The Zero-Click Reality
Fast forward to now where we are living in what industry experts call the "zero-click" era. AI models draw from vast amounts of web data to generate outputs, these sources are rarely credited, eliminating creators' ability to monetise their work through traditional traffic-based models.
The same article that might have generated thousands of page views, ad impressions, and potential subscribers now gets consumed indirectly through AI summaries, with zero compensation flowing back to the creator.
Meanwhile, original content creators watch their traffic and revenue steadily decline whilst AI companies build billion-dollar businesses on their work. Recent data from US news sites shows the devastating impact is already measurable, with some publishers experiencing significant drops in online audiences directly attributed to AI-powered search summaries.
The Great Fortification: When Defence Became Essential#
Until recently, most content providers resisted implementing sophisticated bot protection services that would protect against this industrial-scale appropriation. News and content sites often serve a majority of content directly from caches on delivery networks, keeping user experience high and costs low. Switching to deep inspection and decision-making for every single request has carried a significant cost increase that is difficult to justify in an already cost-constrained environment.
Generative AI has fundamentally altered this economic calculation.
The Market Acts
This year, services like Tollbit launched and quickly teamed up with edge delivery/security provider Fastly. This brings nascent "pay per crawl" capabilities to site owners and can plug-in to multiple edge providers.
These new solutions complement existing bot management solutions that are evolving for the AI moment, including services like Fastly's AI Bot Protection, Akamai's Bot Manager & AWS Cloudfront WAF among others.
More recently, Cloudflare entered the chat by expanding its bot protection capabilities to target and block AI content crawlers. While this capability isn't new or unique in itself, the extension of these controls to free-tier users and more significantly, proposing a default blocking policy for AI crawlers, is a significant development especially given Cloudflare as a gateway for around 20% of all websites.
The real-world implications of this new reality became clear when Cloudflare publicly documented blocking Perplexity's crawlers, revealing sophisticated evasion techniques that bypass traditional robots.txt restrictions. Perplexity has claimed their crawling was "user-triggered" rather than systematic harvesting, but this distinction is economically meaningless, bot visits extract valuable content without providing traffic value back to creators, regardless of what triggers them.
It's clear the market will shift to fill this need. Models like "pay per crawl" while innovative are unlikely to be widely successful in their current structure, but the message is clear, protecting content is critical and the tools are here and growing.
What Happens Next: The Inevitable Digital Lockdown#
When the US President publicly states that compensating copyright holders for AI training data is "impractical," it sends an unmistakable message to content creators: don't expect regulatory protection, you're on your own.
This forces copyright holders into immediate technical action. It's now clear that putting valuable content on the internet without access controls will only result in systematic appropriation without permission or payment.
The New Default Architecture
The web as we know it is about to change radically, from the assumption that most requests come from legitimate readers, to the polar opposite, where every request must be assumed to be a bot until proven otherwise.
Internet edge providers like Cloudflare, Fastly, and Akamai are set to win big as customers flock to protect content that wasn't previously economical to secure. These companies have been delivering bot protection for transactional, eCommerce, and banking sites for years – content protection simply represents an extension of these proven technologies to a new market segment.
The Great Content Blackout
The logical endpoint is inescapable: access to content from ANY automated service will start going dark without explicit licensing deals. The age of the open internet is over.
Operating costs will inevitably increase for content providers, but these must be weighed against the alternative, that is, subsidising billion-dollar AI companies whilst watching your own revenue streams disappear.
What This Means for Your Business Strategy#
If you're a business leader with valuable content assets, the strategic implications are immediate:
Authentication becomes universal: The days of anonymous browsing are numbered. Registration requirements will spread from premium publications to everyday business websites. If you can't identify your visitors, you can't protect your content value.
Direct relationships become premium: Email lists, community platforms, and subscriber relationships will become exponentially more valuable. When you can't rely on search traffic, owned audiences become your lifeline.
Content differentiation matters more: Generic, easily replaceable content will become worthless faster than unique, proprietary insights. Your competitive advantage will increasingly depend on information that can't be easily scraped and repackaged.
New models will emerge: New payment models such as revenue sharing or pay-per-crawl, may emerge. While content remains freely accessible, the incentive to engage or explore these by the major players is minimal.
Content Protection will become the norm: Any individual or business that drives revenue from publishing content on the internet must move towards content protection. Leaving web pages unprotected will only ensure it is consumed and monetised by others.
The Partnership Imperative#
The free and open web we know (and love) is coming to an end. This isn't a temporary disruption, we're witnessing a permanent structural shift in how information flows across the internet.
Content creators who build direct relationships with their audiences and implement strategic content protection will thrive. Those who continue operating under the old assumption that freely accessible content will drive sustainable revenue risk being systematically exploited by AI services.
The internet of the future will be more fragmented, more authenticated, and more expensive to access. What comes next will reward those who understand that in a world where information can be instantly aggregated and redistributed, the real value lies not in creating content, but in creating relationships.
New revenue models and standards may emerge over time, but content creators must take control of who has access to their content now or risk disappearing overall. The time for reactive strategies has passed – the future belongs to those who act decisively today.
Shields up!
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If you found this analysis valuable, I'd encourage you to subscribe to Code & Consequence on LinkedIn. Each edition explores how today's technical decisions shape tomorrow's business landscape, helping leaders navigate the intersection of technology and strategy.
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