Flutterby™! : Google extracting from the commons

This Metafilter comment on the decline of Google is such a wonderful summary of how, once Google has always been somewhere on the spectrum between cooperative player in an ecosystem and extractive, and how the extractive nature has become overwhelming:

My phrasing of this point differs, but not in disagreement or criticism, just as another way to view it through the lens of wnissen's really excellent phrasing above:

"The original intent of Backrub was to profit off of the work of Internet curators without paying them for their time creating high-quality sites."

Which is the essence of the modern AI content theft problem as well, only starting twenty-five years ago. Once Google's full-text search devalued the effort of curators, most of the unpaid ones stopped doing it at all. Later on, the paid ones got replaced by algorithms. Which means that today, Google Search no longer has the data necessary to function as designed.