Where there are no gates, there are no gatekeepers
We're looking at the finger and not at the moon. As the EC focuses on writing norms, the web for which these norms are written no longer exists. We are witnessing an evolution towards what I like to call a post-search era. AI assistants (be they conversational tools such as ChatGPT/Claude or physical devices such as Rabbit's R1) will one day become the primary (if not the only) interfaces for web access. These models could evolve into primary aggregators and distributors of information, particularly in over-fragmented industries such as ours.
In the future (and to a certain extent, even today), the conventional practice of browsing through multiple sites or proprietary applications may become obsolete, and the main idea of a gatekeeper will become outdated, too. We're moving from an informative web, based on websites, to a generative web, based on content generation. AI assistants, powered by a myriad of APIs, with the World Wide Web as the underlying infrastructure and AI as the user interface.
Would you consider Reddit a gatekeeper when it sells its data to OpenAI? Or is OpenAI the gatekeeper? Or, more likely, in this post-web world, does it still make sense to talk about gatekeepers?
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