Doctorow: Google turned from publishers' partner into a value-extracting parasite
RobWaugh74 · x · 2026-10-22
Quoting Cory Doctorow's blog post "The death of history's most successful publisher":
- For most of its history, Google operated in a virtuous cycle with publishers — they allowed crawling, Google connected them with audiences.
- Today that cycle has turned vicious: Google acts as "a parasite that extracts value and offers nothing in return," with AI answers keeping users on Google instead of clicking through.
An industry critique of traffic distribution in the search/AI era, without further detail in the post.
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