Google Search Is Dying. What Comes Next Is Worse

Google's AI summaries are inventing facts, from sunset times to legal rulings, eroding trust in the world's dominant search engine. Meanwhile, the internet's archival infrastructure is collapsing: Disney deleted FiveThirtyEight's archive, Wikipedia's traffic is dwindling as AI scrapes its content, and the Internet Archive faces lawsuits and blocks. This degradation threatens our collective memory and cultural sovereignty, prompting some governments, like France, to build alternatives. The piece argues for treating information retrieval as public infrastructure, not a free consumer service.