Speaking at a Fortune Brainstorm Tech panel held earlier this month on the future of discovery, titled “Search Engine Zero,” Prince outlined a growing crisis for content creators, arguing the internet’s fundamental business model is breaking. The shift from search engines to AI-powered “answer engines” is decimating the web traffic that has historically funded publishers, potentially leading to a future where a handful of tech billionaires become Medici-like patrons and gatekeepers of knowledge.

This marks a radical departure, Prince added, from much of the history of the web, where Google has been “the great patron” of the internet. “The web has never been free,” he argued. “Someone has always paid for it.” Google’s search engine acted as a “treasure map,” he said, sending traffic to content creators, who then monetized that traffic. Prince explained that this system, which itself represented a radical departure from traditional print media business models, is now collapsing.

Techno-renaissance capitalism

Prince painted a grim picture of the potential consequences. One “nihilistic, horrible outcome” is that media and research institutions may simply “starve to death and die.” However, he finds a different scenario more likely: a dystopian return to a pre-Renaissance media landscape. He said AI leaders like Sam Altman could one day control the flow of information, reminiscent of the powerful Medici family of the 1400s, the archetypal Italian merchant-princes at the heart of early capitalism who controlled breathtaking fortunes—along with a huge grip on information itself.

“It could be that we go back to a time where there are five powerful families out there that control all information,” Prince warned, raising the hypothetical of Altman controlling “his own version” of the Associated Press, or acquiring the major research firms Gartner or Forrester.

To avert this future, Prince argued “the AI companies have to start paying for content.” Prince then turned to fellow panelists and said they were partnering to try to advance exactly this. Nodding to People CEO Neil Vogel and Idealab CEO Bill Gross, he explained that Cloudflare has implemented a system to block AI crawlers from training on those executives’ sites by default, unless they pay for data.

Vogel, whose company includes 40 major brands including People and Food & Wine, called this move essential for gaining leverage. He noted that Google traffic to his company, “the largest publisher in America by far,” has plummeted from around 65% to the high 20s. While Vogel described OpenAI as a “good actor” with whom they have a commercial deal, he singled out Google as, rather than a patron, a “bad actor” for using a single web crawler for both its search product and its AI products, forcing publishers into an impossible choice.

Like a ‘giant block of Swiss cheese’

Other panelists expressed deep caution. Janice Min, CEO of Ankler Media, compared the situation to previous tech disruptions, where platforms like Meta and Google initially offered publishers deals before pulling “the carpet back up and took everything.” She warned against giving information away to build tech platforms whose incentives are fundamentally different from those of creators. This sentiment was echoed by another panelist who noted that unlike Netflix, which at least licensed its initial content, today’s AI companies “just took it and act like they’re entitled to it.”

Despite the dire warnings, Prince also expressed optimism for a potential “golden age of content creation.” He argued that AI models are creating a new market that values unique, quirky content—like that found on Reddit—more than established media. And then he made a bizarre analogy.

The internet has enabled, Prince argued, a “relatively good mathematical model of all human knowledge” for the first time in history. He said he thinks of it like a “giant block of Swiss cheese,” with many holes in it. The problem, according to Prince, is that newspapers such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times are “really not that different.” The content creators of the future, he argued, have a chance to fill in all of these holes in human knowledge, and the AI companies can help them do that—in one outcome.