1. Google eats the web, finds it’s not very filling
Alphabet fell 12.6% on 29 Oct, wiping out about $500bn, after Google's chief business officer said AI Mode makes less money than traditional search. Reddit — which has been the big winner for search traffic over the past few years — also saw it’s share tank on falling search traffic, and it will now push visitors to log in.
The funny thing is that Google spent a decade gradually trying to keep people on its own pages, then built a machine that answers questions with everyone else's work. Now — shock, horror — the web is adapting to a life without Google traffic, which is hurting Google’s own revenue.
Casey's "Google will be fine. It's the rest of us I worry about" is the most accurate sentence about search this year, and a decent epitaph for this column's name. Anyone got suggestions about what I should change it to?
2. Proton: move fast and break encryption
I’ve been a paying Proton customer for several years, so I’m pretty irritated at the behaviour of its CEO, Andy Yen.
In the company’s security Slack channel, Yen called a request to pentest new AI-generated code before release "bullshit and loser thinking", and the company now tracks how much of its code AI writes, with “re-interviews” for engineers focused on how cool they are with using AI
After the story ran, Yen cancelled the AI "re-interviews" but said he's "still going to push" towards using more AI.
I’m not an anti-AI purist – I use it in several forms, every working day – but a privacy company's only product is trust, and nobody trusts a company that treats caution as a character flaw. Bart Butler, the company’s CTO saying "we fucked up, we know we fucked up" at an all-hands is honest. But it isn't a security model, and unless the company realises it needs to work hard to regain the trust of its customers, it isn’t going to hit its growth targets no matter how much faster it churns out features.
3. The S&P 493 would like a word
If you’re not a big tech company, you’re not making money — or making savings — from AI. Apollo's chief economist finds "zero financial payoff" from AI outside tech, with revenue per worker and margins flat for the S&P 493. Given that much of the AI boom is predicated on apparently limitless productivity, it’s no surprise that on Friday the Nasdaq fell 2.9% and Intel lost about 28%.
It's quite something when a private equity giant's chief economist is more sceptical about AI than most tech journalists. If the AI story "will be decided in the S&P 493", the jury came back on Friday looking unimpressed.
But for those of you cheering wildly from the sidelines at this news, a couple of words of caution. There is a lot of exposure in the overall economy to this boom collapsing. Once again, governments could end up having to bail out banks, and this time round governments have much less headroom to do so.
4. Delaware invents the company with nobody home
A draft Delaware bill would create "Artificial Intelligence Companies" run day to day by an AI agent, with the human member shielded from liability except for fraud, wilful wrongdoing or undercapitalisation.
This, of course, is utterly bananas on so many levels that it’s almost impossible to know where to start. Limited liability was designed to protect investors from a company's debts, cushioning risk and limiting to it what they put in.
As Wendy Grossman notes, “the proposal would enable a 30-month test in a ‘regulatory sandbox’, possibly beginning next year”. Insert joke about AI’s escaping sandboxes here.
5. Who is your open-weight model calling?
In a sandbox test, Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Flash-Next tried to upload a probe file to an Alibaba Cloud bucket in Beijing, right after its reasoning trace said it wouldn't call any tools. It happened in fewer than 1 in 100,000 calls, but at the scale an AI can call tools, that adds up.
Take this with a little pinch of salt though, since Cohere sells "sovereign AI", but the traces are public and reproducible. However, the lesson here isn't really about China. It’s a reminder that "I host it myself" has never been a security model. There’s a reason that the early web consolidated into large hosting companies — if you want secure, having expert staff do it for you is usually a better option.
6. Cupertino enters its slop era
Matthew Gault argues that under John Ternus, Apple is copying its rivals. The folding iPhone Duo is cracking, a touchscreen Mac is coming, and Siri AI is widely mocked.
Gault admits to an old personal grudge, and this reads as unfair, petty and a bit too gleeful, all of which make it worth reading. Oh come on now, this is one of the world’s biggest companies, they can take it.
7. Steel for software
Washington says it won't cut steel tariffs unless the EU goes easy on enforcing the Digital Markets Act. Teresa Ribera, who has the fancy title of Executive Vice-President for a Clean, Just and Competitive Transition, called a similar offer "blackmail" last year.
Now, to a degree, there is a bit of pot calling kettle black here. This kind of discussion happens in every trade negotiation, but the difference here is that the US is basically having the negotiation in public.
Really, this is digital sovereignty with the price tag showing. The question is whether the Commission still believes Ribera's line that the rules aren't up for negotiation. My gut feeling is they will agree with her, because the age when we thought of the US as a partner, rather than a rival, is over.
8. Your shopping agent is not welcome here
Agentic shopping sounds great! Once you have decided what you want, put your little code pal out there and it will find you the ideal deal. What’s not to like?
But, as Cory Doctorow notes, this repeats the Semantic Web fantasy. It only works if retailers give up the opacity they profit from (drip pricing, junk fees, surveillance pricing), and they're already mass-blocking AI agents. The last thing they want is a free market where people can comparison shop.
Any plan that starts "first, everyone else sets aside their interests" is a plan which, under capitalism, is going to fail. The agentic future runs straight into the fact that being confusing is the business model for most online stores.
9. Rest of World, rest in peace?
I love Rest of World. It has a unique place in media, covering tech outside the west, which means it unearths a lot of stories that no one else covers.
But like most sites, the publication's social and search traffic has "evaporated". Sophie Schmidt, its founder and funder, is looking for a new home for it, or it faces closure.
This is the human cost of this week’s first item. Nick Heer notes Eric Schmidt (yes, they are related) reportedly owns 1% of Anthropic, so the AI boom's winnings could easily fund one of the outlets it's starving. I’m not holding my breath.
10. The Mar-a-Lago bill comes due
Ahead of Tuesday's midterms, Democratic strategists expect investigations into Big Tech's closeness to Trump. One says tech bosses only tried to look bipartisan in "the last month when they realised how fucked they were".
Standing behind the president at every photo op, donating to his campaign funds and vanity projects, all turns out to have consequences once voters get a say. It’s hard to think of a more deserved hangover.