This toot is a diagnosis of a small shift, but thinking it’s trapped inside a narrow, liberal property lens on what the internet is and was supposed to be. What’s being described as a “split” between a Free-For-All quarry and gated communities is what happens when you assume the web was primarily about enforceable intellectual property contracts in the first place. That framing already accepts the #dotcons worldview – that value is created by ownership, extraction, and legal enclosure.
From an #openweb and #OMN perspective, that was never the path. The early web (and the cultures that fed into it – FOSS, mailing lists, blogs, wikis) wasn’t held together by copyright enforcement. It was held together by norms: reciprocity, attribution, sharing, trust, and rough social accountability. That’s much closer to the #4opens than to IP law. Open code, open standards, open data, open process – not because the law enforced fairness, but because social relations did.
What #AI scraping has broken is not a legal equilibrium, but a fragile social one that the #dotcons had already been hollowing out for decades. They didn’t rely on “fair use” or reciprocity – they relied on enclosure, centralisation, and extraction, #AI simply accelerates that logic. So yes, “anything reachable by HTTP becomes fuel” is accurate – but the mistake is thinking the alternative is stronger copyright walls or more contractual gating, that deepens enclosure. The split you describe is real, but it’s not new, and it’s not caused by #AI, it’s the endpoint of a long enclosure of commons → platform capture (#dotcons), trust → contracts, sharing → surveillance + monetisation and public space → login walls.
The current AI mess is not the origin of this, it’s just a new layer of extraction sitting on top of the #mainstreaming mess. From an #OMN view, the interesting question isn’t how to reassert IP over scraping. It’s how to rebuild social and technical spaces where contribution, context, and reciprocity matter again – where value isn’t just extracted but circulated in ways communities can govern.
AI is not an existential threat to the #openweb, it’s an asshole amplifier inside an already broken system. The real loss we need to compost isn’t only copyright protection, it’s the erosion of the social commons that made openness meaningful in the first place.
