https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-asv7b-1b60e0e

What does it mean for the web to be open—and open to whom?

For most of the web’s history, we’ve operated on a fairly simple assumption: if you put something on a public website, people could find it, search engines could index it, and information could move relatively freely across the internet. But as AI systems increasingly crawl, extract, learn from, and act on information from the web, that bargain is beginning to change.

My guest today is Shane Evans, co-founder and CEO of Zyte, a company that builds technology for extracting data from the public web for use in AI, analytics, and other applications.

Shane has been working on the web since the late 1990s. He was a lead engineer at lastminute.com during the dot-com era, later created Scrapy, the widely used open-source web-scraping framework, and founded Zyte in 2010.

Today, we’re talking about Zyte’s new research suggesting that the Open Web is increasingly becoming a “Controlled Web”—and what that means for publishers, AI companies, web users, and the future of access to information online.