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Last week, The Browser Company, a startup that makes the Arc web browser, released<\/a> a slick new iPhone app called Arc Search. Instead of displaying links, its brand new \u201cBrowse for Me\u201d feature reads the first handful of pages and summarizes them into a single, custom-built, Arc-formatted web page using large language models from OpenAI and others. If a user does click through to any of the actual pages, Arc Search blocks ads, cookies and trackers by default. Arc\u2019s efforts to reimagine web browsing have received near-universal acclaim<\/a>. But over the last few days, \u201cBrowse for Me\u201d earned The Browser Company its first online backlash.<\/p>\n For decades, websites have served ads and pushed people visiting them towards paying for subscriptions. Monetizing traffic is one of the primary ways most creators on the web continue to make a living. Reducing the need for people to visit actual websites deprives those creators of compensation for their work, and disincentivizes them from publishing anything at all.<\/p>\n \u201cWeb creators are trying to share their knowledge and get supported while doing so\u201d, tweeted<\/a> Ben Goodger, a software engineer who helped create both Firefox and Chrome. \u201cI get how this helps users. How does it help creators? Without them there is no web\u2026\u201d After all, if a web browser sucked out all information from web pages without users needing to actually visit them, why would anyone bother making websites in the first place?<\/p>\n The backlash has prompted the company\u2019s co-founder and CEO Josh Miller to question the fundamental nature of how the web is monetized. Miller, who was previously a product director at the White House and worked at Facebook after it acquired his previous startup, Branch, told<\/a> Goodger on X that how creators monetize web pages needs to evolve. He also told<\/a> Platformer<\/em>\u2019s Casey Newton that generative AI presents an opportunity to \u201cshake up the stagnant oligopoly that runs much of the web today\u201d but admitted that he didn\u2019t know how writers and creators who made the actual website that his browser scrapes from would be compensated. \u201cIt completely upends the economics of publishing on the internet,\u201d he admitted.<\/p>\n Miller declined to speak to Engadget, and The Browser Company did not respond to Engadget\u2019s questions.<\/p>\n Arc set itself apart from other web browsers by fundamentally rethinking how web browsers look and work ever since it was released to the general public in July last year. It did this by adding features like the ability to split multiple tabs vertically and offering a picture-in-picture mode for Google Meet video conferences. But for the last few months, Arc has been rapidly adding<\/a> AI-powered features such as automatic web page summaries, ChatGPT integration and giving users the option to switch their default search engine to Perplexity, a Google rival that uses AI to provide answers to search queries by summarizing web pages in a chat-style interface and providing tiny citations to sources. The \u201cBrowse for Me\u201d feature lands Arc smack in the middle of one of AI\u2019s biggest ethical quandaries<\/a>: who pays creators when AI products rip off and repurpose their content?<\/p>\n \u201cThe best thing about the internet is that somebody super passionate about something makes a website about the thing that they love,\u201d tech entrepreneur and blogging pioneer Anil Dash told Engadget. \u201cThis new feature from Arc intermediates that and diminishes that.\u201d In a post<\/a> on Threads shortly after Arc released the app, Dash criticized modern search engines and AI chatbots that sucked up the internet\u2019s content and aimed to stop people from visiting websites, calling them \u201cdeeply destructive.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s easy, Dash said, to blame the pop-ups, cookies and intrusive advertisements that power the economic engine of the modern web as the reason why browsing feels broken now. And there may be signs that users are warming to the concept of having their information presented to them summarized by large language models rather than manually clicking around multiple web pages. On Thursday, Miller tweeted<\/a> that people chose \u201cBrowse for Me\u201d over regular Google search in Arc Search on mobile for approximately 32 percent of all queries. The company is currently working on making that the default search experience and also bringing it to its desktop browser.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not intellectually honest to say that this is better for users,\u201d said Dash. \u201cWe only focus on short term user benefit and not the idea that users want to be fully informed about the impact they\u2019re having on the entire digital ecosystem by doing this.\u201d Summarizing this double-edged sword succinctly a food blogger tweeted<\/a> at Miller, “As a consumer, this is awesome. As a blogger, I\u2019m a lil afraid.\u201d<\/p>\n Last week, Matt Karolian, the vice president of platforms, research and development at The Boston Globe typed \u201ctop Boston news\u201d into Arc Search and hit \u201cBrowse for Me\u201d. Within seconds, the app had scanned local Boston news sites and presented a list of headlines containing local developments and weather updates. \u201cNews orgs are gonna lose their shit about Arc Search,\u201d Karolian posted<\/a> on Threads. \u201cIt\u2019ll read your journalism, summarize it for the user\u2026and then if the user does click a link, they block the ads.\u201d<\/p>\n Local news publishers, Karolian told Engadget, almost entirely depend on selling ads and subscriptions to readers who visit their websites to survive. \u201cWhen tech platforms come along and disintermediate that experience without any regard for the impact it could have, it is deeply disappointing.\u201d Arc Search does include prominent links and citations to the websites it summarizes from. But Karolian said that this misses the point. \u201cIt fails to ponder the consequences of what happens when you roll out products like this.\u201d<\/p>\n Arc Search isn\u2019t the only service using AI to summarize information from web pages. Google, the world\u2019s biggest search engine, now offers AI-generated summaries to users\u2019 queries at the top of its search results, something that experts have previously called<\/a> \u201ca bit like dropping a bomb right at the center of the information nexus.\u201d Arc Search, however, goes a step beyond and eliminates search results altogether. Meanwhile, Miller has continued to tweet throughout the controversy, posting vague musings<\/a> about websites in an \u201cAI-first internet\u201d while simultaneously releasing products based on concepts he has admittedly still not sorted out.<\/p>\n