Why open access and an open web matter

AI is changing how content gets found and consumed. Answers travel through chat now, but content was never only answers. Stories, the things that shape how we see what’s around us, are being reshaped by the same conversational format. And AI chatbots are themselves becoming gatekeepers: someone decides what you get to see and how, and that someone is rarely you.

Meanwhile, monetization is in flux. Subscriptions have hit a ceiling. Advertising is under regulatory and attention pressure. Affiliate and influence are filling the gap on their own opaque terms. Each shift narrows the path to a sustainable open web.

Underneath all of it sits a single quieter question: an open internet where information is roughly free, or a closed one where only the lucky few curate their own view? The closed version isn’t obviously better; a narrower view is rarely a less biased one.

Open access is worth fighting for. Paywalls put a price on who gets to be informed, and the people priced out are rarely a random sample. The ad-supported web is messy, but it’s the only model we have that scales without that filter.

The industry hasn’t been a neutral steward either: AdTech has spent two decades optimizing for advertisers, with opaque infrastructure, treating publishers and audiences as afterthoughts. What keeps me here is the chance to be part of fixing that, making it less opaque, less tilted, more honest, rather than abandoning it for a tidier paywall or an entirely closed ecosystem.