tl;dr
Artificial Intelligence is shattering the internet's broken ad model, forcing a choice: a future of restrictive paywalls or an internet of biased AI. But there is a third path. We can build a new, open monetization layer for the web—one that’s transparent, efficient, and finally puts you in control of your data and its value.
To understand the internet today, you must understand the bargain we all made.
It’s this invisible agreement that dictates what we see, who sees us, and who profits from our attention; a contract written in the quiet hum of servers and the silent flicker of pixels. It’s a story in three acts: a tale of a brilliant, symbiotic invention; its slow fall from grace into a tangled, profit-siphoning machine; and the crisis that now offers us a chance to reclaim the original promise.
It all started with a simple, symbiotic idea.
I. The Symbiotic Engine
The internet, before it was a marketplace, was a commons. Born from academic and military projects, its foundational ethos was one of collaboration and open information exchange, a digital Alexandria-in-the-making. In this early, pre-commercial Eden, content was simply… there. It was free; a powerful and enduring public perception that would shape its destiny.
But for the web to grow beyond a niche community and become the global public square we know, it needed an economic engine. It faced a choice: build walls or build bridges. Subscriptions or advertising.
It chose bridges.
And the idea to cement those bridges was one that defined the next quarter-century of digital life. It was crystallized not in a corporate boardroom, but in the offices of a fledgling online magazine in 1994. The team at HotWired, the new digital offshoot of Wired, needed to pay their writers. Their solution was the first-ever banner ad. It wasn't loud or intrusive. It was a simple, pixelated rectangle from AT&T with a cryptic, irresistible message: “Have you ever clicked your mouse right HERE? You will.”
It was indeed a dare; a digital curiosity gap. And in an era before banner fatigue, people clicked, an astonishing 44% of them.
The ad didn't lead to a hard sell; it linked to a virtual tour of seven of the world's greatest art museums. This established the original, unwritten bargain: in exchange for your attention, you get a free and open web. Sometimes, you even get a gateway to something wonderful.
Let us not understate the importance of this moment.
For the next 25 years, this ad-supported model funded the internet as we know it. It paid for the search engines, the social networks, and the video platforms and the endless expanse of blogs and publications that made information more accessible than ever before. In its early days, advertising was the engine of digital democracy. It leveled the playing field with a pay-per-click model that let a local pizza shop compete with a national chain, not because of a bigger budget, but because of a more relevant message.
II. The Faustian Bargain
The symbiosis did not last. There is a deep irony in the fact that the very tools that made the early web so promising, its measurability and its ability to connect, were the very instruments of its eventual corruption. A technological arms race began, driven by a relentless, logical demand for higher returns, and the focus of this new machine shifted. From the context of a webpage to the profile of the user.
The first banner ads were simple. You saw an ad for a car on a car review site. But with the advent of third-party cookies and sprawling ad networks, a new logic emerged. By tracking your digital footprints, these systems could build a detailed profile of your habits, interests, and desires. The goal was no longer to find the right audience for an ad, but to find the right ad for a specific person, no matter where they were.
This shift gave rise to a new, radically extractive economic model, one that inverted the original relationship entirely: the user was no longer the audience to be served, but the raw material to be processed.
Platforms eventually discovered that the data generated by every click, search, and like constituted an immensely valuable raw material. This "behavioral surplus," as it came to be known, was harvested, fed into machine intelligence systems to manufacture "prediction products," and ultimately sold in a new marketplace that traded in human futures.
The programmatic ad ecosystem is the result: an incredibly inefficient and opaque machine. For every dollar an advertiser spends, a landmark study shows that content creators only see 51 cents. The rest of the money is either taken by middlemen or disappears into an "unknown delta" due to the system's complexity.
The original bargain was broken, replaced by a surveillance model that, while still funding the web, eroded the very trust it so carefully crafted.
III. The Reckoning
Into the midst of this broken system, with its leaky economics and eroded trust, now steps an external shock, so profound it threatens the very foundation of the digital world: Artificial Intelligence.
This is not an incremental change but a fundamental discontinuity, a force that is attacking the old model on three distinct and devastating fronts.
First, generative AI is destroying the click, the essential currency of the open web. For decades, search engines funneled users to publishers, but AI's ability to provide a full, neat summary in the results page turns that traffic bridge into a dead end. This "zero-click" convenience is a death knell for the creators who rely on clicks for revenue.
It's a parasitic dynamic that drains the web of its best content, and it can't last.
Second, AI is making visual ads, the main tool of digital persuasion, obsolete. The next wave of the internet won't be navigated by human eyes alone, but by AI agents—digital assistants that compare products and make purchases for us. These agents ignore flashy banners and emotional imagery. Instead, they analyze data and code to find the best deal.
An entire industry built on visual persuasion is now speaking a language this powerful new consumer can't understand.
Finally, and most profoundly, AI dangerously amplifies the power of influence.
For two decades, a search ad's power was constrained. Google could show you a link, but the final, critical acts of cognition, the research, the comparison, the decision, were yours. The AI agent is not just a search engine; it is a counselor, an assistant, and, if we are not careful, the most effective salesman ever created. Its ability to establish a trusted, even intimate, relationship while guiding a user's choices is unprecedented.
This creates an alarming new conflict of interest at the heart of our digital lives.
Imagine an AI therapist who also tries to sell you a new television, or a financial agent who is secretly incentivized to push a specific loan. The potential for misaligned incentives is frightening, as it turns a seemingly trusted guide into a hidden persuader with a secret agenda. Faced with this triple threat, the industry is scrambling for a new business model. But its early efforts reveal a failure of imagination. Google is weaving ads directly into its AI answers, a move that fundamentally compromises the integrity of its product.
The core value of an AI assistant is its inherently perceived objectivity; the moment that is sold to the highest bidder, the product ceases to be what it purports to be. And although newer players like Perplexity have experimented with less intrusive models,they have struggled to prove their value to advertisers, who find it difficult to justify spending on ads so decoupled from a user's core intent.
And now, because of the failures of ad-based models, many are now turning back to the oldest model: the paywall. However, a subscription-only future for AI is a pessimistic path. It would create a two-tiered system, or "information apartheid," where only the wealthy can afford the best AI tools and knowledge. This completely abandons the principle of universal access that advertising, despite its faults, once supported.
IV. Rebuilding the Commons
For 25 years, the Google model has limited our imagination, making us believe that surveillance is the only way to do advertising. The Google ad model was a model, not the model. We're now at a critical turning point. After two decades of mistakes, we know what not to do. The real question is whether we have the creativity to build something new.
What would an advertising model for the age of AI actually look like?
A successful system would embody the principles of the early web while structurally rejecting the failures of the surveillance era. It would be one that funds a vibrant and open internet, facilitating discovery for all, yet does so on a foundation of transparency and efficiency. For the first time, with conversational AI, we can simply and clearly state what we want.
This signal of desire, our intent, has always been the most valuable asset in the digital economy, the raw material that gets opaquely bought and sold. Above all, to navigate the perilous new landscape of AI, its incentives would have to be inextricably aligned with the user, and no one else, through a system that is fundamentally user-owned and user-controlled.
A new model must be built around it.
This vision of a user-aligned system is the core idea behind the Intents Protocol. It proposes a radical unbundling of the internet's commercial layer. A need of the hour.
For years, a few major companies have bundled the user journey within their "walled gardens." Platforms like Google and Meta control both the application (Search, Facebook) and its monetization layer (Ads). The Intents Protocol is different. It’s not another network, but a foundational, open monetization layer. Designed as public infrastructure, it creates a decentralized system that any application can use.
It is a comprehensive ecosystem, built on a trust layer of smart contracts and cryptographic primitives that manage and match user intents and seller’ bids, supported by rich product catalogs and seller portals, and prepared for the future with a dedicated agentic layer—all governed transparently.
Imagine Maya, who wants a new laptop. Instead of being tracked as she browses, she tells her AI assistant her exact needs: "I need a laptop with an Intel i7, 16GB of RAM, a 10-hour battery, and a budget under $1000."
This precise intent becomes a digital asset that she owns and controls.
It's anonymous. She is not the product. This intent is broadcast to the open monetization layer. Verified sellers see this anonymized intent and bid directly to fulfill it. This allows the app developer (AI assistant developer in this case) to earn a fee for presenting the bid, while the protocol ensures they cannot manipulate the results.. They might even pay a small reward to Maya for the right to present their offer.
The Intents Protocol is a neutral utility for monetization, similar to how HTTP works for information, which breaks the current system's bottlenecks. This new model benefits everyone: users can control and profit from their commercial data; sellers get high-quality leads transparently; and developers can build helpful applications using a fair, shared monetization layer.
As the old ad model falters and subscriptions create inequity, a user-owned model is essential to preserve an open web and protect users from bad incentives. (While this post has focused on the "why," we are just getting started. In our upcoming series, we will detail the protocol's technical architecture and governance.)
And, to prove this model and kickstart the network, we are building the first such application: Inomy, an AI-powered shopping assistant designed from the ground up to leverage the Intents Protocol, maximize user agency, and return the vast majority of value to the user.
While Inomy serves as our initial proof of concept, the ultimate goal is for the Intents Protocol to become a foundational layer where any developer can build and monetize their own applications. Though the ad-supported web was once a good deal, it has soured over time. AI is the final catalyst for its failure, and sticking with the old model means the open web withers away.
The Intents Protocol presents a different path.
More than just a technology, it's a new social contract for the internet - a journey we are just beginning to outline. It's a chance to move beyond a broken bargain and build a new one based on choice, transparency, and shared value. This is how we rebuild the internet's commons, putting user sovereignty at its core and finally making our digital presence something we truly own.
One where you’re not the product, but the owner.