The Walled Garden of the Surveilled Web
12 hours ago
- #Digital Surveillance
- #Information Ecology
- #Web Search
- The open web is disappearing not due to publishing difficulties but because discovery is being absorbed into vendor-specific information environments, with Google as the central case.
- Google dominates global web search (over 90% share), making exclusion from it a de facto exclusion from the main public discovery layer, though other search engines follow similar patterns.
- Alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, Kagi, and Brave often rely on existing large indexes, while smaller independent ones like Marginalia and Wiby use curation, but they don't change Google's defining influence.
- Search engines function as measurement systems, where visibility depends on compatibility with telemetry (e.g., user behavior data), monetization signals, and infrastructure like browsers, CDNs, and DNS.
- Surveillance compatibility creates a wall where sites need observable traffic (e.g., via Chrome UX Report) to gain visibility, disadvantaging privacy-preserving or small-scale sites.
- Monetization compatibility favors commercial sites that generate measurable signals (e.g., ads, SEO), while noncommercial knowledge (the 'small web') lacks such evidence, skewing visibility.
- State removal and private editorial power act as walls, with governments requesting content takedowns and platforms making opaque decisions, affecting accessibility without transparency.
- LLMs amplify these issues by training on and retrieving through filtered web layers, leading to epistemic homogenization and underrepresentation of rare, independent knowledge.
- Convergence of search, browsers, OS telemetry, advertising, and policy creates walled gardens where the visible web aligns with vendor interests, rendering absence invisible to users.
- Future risks include an 'Internet of gardens' where high-liability services may require vendor-authenticated access, further marginalizing the open web.