Author: mrich1287@gmail.com

Let me tell you something, kiddo. I’ve lived through more “Internets” than I’ve had pets, and I’m here to report that Internet 3.0 is shaping up to be the biggest crock of digital horse doodoo yet.

Internet 1.0? Ah, the good old days. You typed something into a box, hit Enter, and the whole world’s knowledge came tumbling out like a busted piñata. Free. Open. Wild. You could wander around like a raccoon in a campground, rummaging through whatever you wanted. Granted, the pickings were slim but they were free.

Internet 2.0? That’s when the suits showed up. Suddenly everything had a shopping cart, a login screen, and a Terms of Service longer than the Dead Sea Scrolls. But fine — we got used to it. We clicked ads, we bought things, we pretended social media was “connecting us” instead of turning us into lemmings.

But now? Now we’re marching straight into Internet 3.0, where you don’t even use the internet anymore. Your virtual assistant does it for you. You just sit there like a confused grandpa in a self‑driving car, hoping it doesn’t decide to take you to the dentist instead of the grocery store.

And the browser? Forget it. The browser’s going the way of floppy disks and phone books. In Internet 3.0, the assistant fetches everything — if it’s allowed to fetch anything at all.

Because here’s the kicker:

All the websites are slamming the door shut on AI.

They’re putting up paywalls, toll booths, velvet ropes, and probably a bouncer named Billy who says, “Sorry bro, no AIs allowed unless they’re on the VIP list.”

And who’s on the VIP list?

The Frontier labs and hyperscalers.

The big boys. The cloud titans. The folks who already own half the internet and are working on the other half.

They’re the only ones who can afford the new “AI browsing fees,” which will probably cost more per month than my first house. Meanwhile, the little guy — the indie dev, the hobbyist, the tinkerer — gets told:

“Sorry, pal. You can’t afford to look at the data anymore. But don’t worry — we’ll rent it back to you at 10¢ per token.”

It’s the same story every generation. Somebody invents something cool, everybody gets excited, and then the corporate types swoop in like seagulls at a beach picnic and steal all the sandwiches.

And Google? Oh, Google’s in a pickle. They’ve gotta sacrifice their precious Search traffic — the thing that made them rich enough to buy entire zip codes — just so they can stay in the game. They’re out here saying:

“Sure, Gemini can answer your question directly. We didn’t need those ad clicks anyway. Ha ha. Ha… ha… oh no.”

Because if they don’t get ahead of this, the Frontier labs will eat their lunch, their dinner, and probably their browser too.

So here we are, marching bravely into Internet 3.0:

• No browser
• No open web
• No free information
• Just assistants
• Just paywalls
• Just hyperscalers selling back the data they scraped from us in the first place

And you know what?

Grumppa’s not impressed.

But he is amused. Because every time the internet reinvents itself, it somehow manages to look exactly like the last version — just with more subscriptions.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go yell at a cloud. Not the weather kind — the AWS kind. They deserve it.

Oh, and yeah, AI helped me write this….

First, a little context. I’ve survived several tech shifts: personal computing, the Internet, Y2K (remember the canned goods?), Web 2.0, and Cloud hosting. To me, AI was just another incremental evolution—until it personally ambushed me last night.

As an architect, I’m professionally paid to be a “change agent,” which is a fancy way of saying I look for benefits and impacts of new tech. But I wasn’t prepared for the impact I experienced while doing some long-overdue digital housekeeping on thousands of family photos.

I finally gathered the digital mountain into one place and asked an AI for a way to de-duplicate them, knowing I’d archived the same blurry vacation photos in three different places. The AI was suspiciously obliging, offering a “free” tool that fit my situation perfectly. I downloaded it, ran it, and felt like a productivity god.

The app worked perfectly, identifying thousands of clones. Then I saw the “Remove All” button—the holy grail of cleanup. I clicked. Immediately, a prompt appeared: “Upgrade to Premium to use this feature!” It turns out ‘free’ meant I could delete them manually, which required three clicks and a agonizingly slow window pop-up for every single file. It was the digital equivalent of being offered a free car, only to find out the steering wheel costs $500.

Instead of giving in to the paywall, I went back to the AI and asked if there was a way to do this efficiently for actual, literal zero dollars. The AI didn’t skip a beat. “Yes,” it said, and proceeded to write custom code that used the app’s own output to “automagically” delete the files. Within 15 minutes, I had dumped 50GB of digital trash into the Recycle Bin without spending a dime.

That’s when the realization hit me: AI had just short-circuited the developer’s entire business model. The old “hook them with convenience, then charge for the solution” strategy was dead in the water. If AI #1 builds a paywall, what stops me from asking AI #2 to build a ladder over it? We’re heading toward a world where software might become like music in the early 2000s—one original, and millions of AI-generated workarounds.

Needless to say, for the first time, AI is starting to worry me—not because of “Terminator” robots, but because of what it’s going to do to the economy when the “convenience fee” disappears.