Shut Your Curtains

Remember when information wanted to be free? That was adorable.

It’s 2007. Facebook is exploding, everyone’s poking each other (literally), and I’m frantically trying to Google something I saw go viral on the platform. Nothing. Nada. The content simply doesn’t exist in Google’s universe.

Back then, this felt wrong—like someone had built a garden wall around part of the internet. Facebook was creating a "second circulation of information"—a parallel universe where content lived and died without ever touching the open web.

At the time, this felt against everything the internet stood for.

So were the first paywalls sprouting up here and there.

The Death by a Thousand Scrapes

Fast forward to 2025. AI scrapers aren’t just creating walled gardens—they’re strip-mining the entire open internet and feeding it into training data grinders.

Matthew Prince from Cloudflare recently dropped some numbers that should terrify every content creator:

2015: Google scraped 2 pages → sent you 1 visitor

2024: Google scraped 6 pages → sent you 1 visitor

2025 (today): Google scrapes 18 pages → sends you 1 visitor

But wait, it gets worse:

OpenAI: 250-to-1 ratio six months ago → 1,500-to-1 today

Anthropic: 6,000-to-1 six months ago → 60,000-to-1 today

People aren’t following the footnotes.

Prince puts it bluntly:

I don’t know if you can’t sell subscriptions and you can’t sell ads and you don’t get an ego hit from knowing that people are consuming your stuff why anyone’s going to create content.

Let’s do some uncomfortable math. You pour your expertise into a 2,000-word article. An AI scrapes it, digests it, and serves a perfect summary to 60,000 people who never visit your site. You get the satisfaction of… contributing to humanity’s knowledge base?

That’s not a business model.

The Curtain Call

Cloudflare promises tools to block these scrapers—that’s coming.

But to me it’s the final rise of the private internet:

• Closed communities
• Premium newsletters
• Private servers

Once upon a time, we all lived in one big digital cave, shared everything, and privacy was this weird concept that old people worried about.

Today, like in the real world, curtains are one of the first things you buy for your digital apartment.

The open internet isn’t dying from regulation or censorship. It’s dying from success—the success of AI systems so good at summarizing and synthesizing that they’ve made the original sources obsolete.

The only way forward may be to stop feeding the machine for free.

The future belongs to those who can create scarcity.

Your expertise, your community, your direct relationship with readers—these are the things that can’t be scraped, summarized, or automated away.

It’s time to shut your curtains.