Information is Capital Now
Google's newest update eats more of the web, at a time when big media is getting out of the information business
For the first time in 25 years, Google - the organiser of the world’s information - is changing Search.
You’ve probably already seen - and hate - the AI overviews at the top of the page. Now, they’re growing. Google’s Search box is getting more interactive, so people can ask it longer questions, and is pulling in more information from other websites so you never have to leave Google.com again.
“Links will become an afterthought with the coming changes to the Search results experience,” according to TechCrunch. “The open web is on its way out,” Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research, told the New York Times.
Here’s what’s being dismantled, quietly and at scale: the link economy. The architecture of the early web - where where traffic flowed between sites, where a small publication could in theory reach a large audience - is being enclosed. The ad-funded model that made the free web possible ran on that traffic. Google’s AI Overviews don’t just threaten publishers by keeping users on Google.com; they hollow out the entire ecosystem that kept independent voices financially viable in the first place.
As I’ve written before, this is ‘Google Zero’ at full throttle — the point at which Google provides zero traffic to a website, now generalised across the entire web.
And I think that’s because the powerful have stopped seeing information as a shared value and started treating it like capital they own.
Google has something competitors like OpenAI or Anthropic don’t: sheer entrenched might. Search is insanely profitable and has been the financial backbone of everything else Google has ever done. That gives the company the ability to cannibalise itself in a way that smaller players, or even well-capitalised ones, simply cannot match.
OpenAI is not broke, but it doesn’t have fifty years of accumulated search dominance and the world’s dominant advertising network as a backstop. Google can afford to lose the web, because it already owns what replaces it.
Elon Musk is running the same play. After he purchased Twitter, the company - haemorrhaging money and advertisers - had to be folded into his other companies: Tesla’s valuation, SpaceX’s government contracts, xAI’s investment rounds, all functioning as backup capital to keep the lights on at X.
The platform doesn’t need to be profitable. It just needs to exist, and to function as a political instrument. The money flows from elsewhere; the influence flows from the platform.
And here is where the media question becomes interesting - because the right-wing media proprietors going through their own audience collapse are doing exactly the same thing.
The Daily Wire, founded by Ben Shapiro, has seen its YouTube subscriber count declining over the past year. GB News remains unprofitable in the UK, despite growing audiences, with the costs eaten by its parent company, All Perspectives, which takes money from Dubai-based private investment firm Legatum Ventures.
CBS News - having partnered with the BBC since 2017 - saw its owner David Ellison pay $150 million for Bari Weiss’s Free Press, a deal made in the context of Ellison’s political positioning relative to Trump.
The biggest example of saying the quiet part loud: Jeff Bezos, who shifted the Washington Post’s opinion section to defend two pillars — personal liberties and free markets — triggering over 300,000 cancellations that he was warned about in advance. His response, per The New York Times: “I don’t care.”
The thread that runs through all of this is not just right-wing ideology, though it is that too. It’s the logic of political investment. GB News exists to shift the Overton window in Britain, funded by money that doesn’t need a return. The Free Press exists to launder a particular brand of contrarian centrism into mainstream acceptability, at whatever cost. The Daily Wire exists to build a captive conservative audience that can be delivered to political causes. Bezos didn’t buy the Washington Post to make money; he bought it because owning a major American newspaper is useful, and although that’s not what his customers want, he doesn’t mind watching them go.
The ratings don’t matter because ratings aren’t the product. The audience is, at best, a secondary concern. The primary concern is influence - on policy, narrative, and what questions get asked and what get treated as settled.
The problem for anyone hoping a different model might push back against this is structural, and it’s the same problem at the infrastructure level as at the media level. It is genuinely difficult for smaller players, and even larger ones, to compete with institutions that don’t need to be financially viable because they’re underwritten by capital deployed for political ends.
The open web and the information age’s replacement isn’t being built on the “free market of ideas”, but the ability to absorb losses that would bankrupt any entity actually accountable to its audience.
Once information is capital, it behaves like all other capital: it concentrates, it walls itself off, and it serves whoever owns it.