The Walrus reframes the death of Google Search as an infrastructure crisis, not a quality complaint. The opening tells you everything: Google’s AI summaries invented sunset times, so a user in Colorado “was simply living in the past” while waiting for an event AI said had already happened.
The essay then walks the failure chain:
- Link rot erasing pages; the Library of Congress briefly lost sections of the Constitution to a coding error
- FiveThirtyEight’s archive deleted outright by Disney once it stopped being an asset
- Wikipedia’s traffic collapsing — AI ingests it directly, so attention and donations no longer flow back
- The Internet Archive battered by lawsuits, crawler blocks, and cyberattacks
- Companies planting content on Reddit to steer AI-generated answers — pollution moving upstream into the corpus itself
The sharpest legal detail: a German court held Google liable for false statements in its AI overviews, reasoning that a search engine which extracts and rewrites information is authoring a new layer of content and bears editorial responsibility.
The essay’s real argument is preservation and sovereignty. One future is an internet “randomly remembered by machines and monetized by intermediaries.” The alternative — a public internet treated as infrastructure — has precedent: France’s Qwant, the European Parliament’s switch, and Canada’s own history of building public digital infrastructure (CANARIE, SchoolNet, Open Journal Systems).
We can survive bad search results. We can’t survive a society that can’t retrieve its own memory.