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  • Hacker News
  • The openweb will go the way of usenet. Bots talking to bots, fetching information for a higher tool.
    by sigspec
  • Without a convenience moat, commerce will get even more adversarial: membership pricing, surveillance pricing, loyalty perks, varied products to avoid price comparison (like mattresses and Costco).

    Fortunately, if AI is really superhuman in capabilities it may still win the battle for the customer and keep prices competitive: aggressive price comparison, alternatives discovery, negotiation, group buying, etc.

    by xnx
  • Companies don't want it to be easy to cross shop their competition, the whole premise of Amazon is that it's so easy and simple you don't even check the competition. AI agents are leveling the playing field and helping customers find the best deals, so of course they're being banned
    by variety8675
  • This is expected. A lot of these companies that are closing their doors make a large portion of their revenue based off of ads and upsells which agents can easily be instructed to ignore, and don't interact with like a human.

    Another more blunt way to say it is that people can instruct their agents to look out for their best interests (and while there are cracks they continue to get better at this), and companies hate that.

    People will work around it similar to how we've worked around with adblockers for years, and it will just become a game of attrition as these companies work to preserve their moats until they find a way to preserve this revenue stream off of people's agents.

    by Jcampuzano2
  • I think people who rally against Amazon in this topic assume that the "savings" from much open price competition immediately come back to the consumer or the manufacturer. In my experience, with previous such tech improvement such as 'uber disrupting taxies', this has never been the case.

    Both the consumer and the manufacturer/labor/driver/gig-worker always get the short end of the stick.... once AI-agents becomes indispensable part of life.

    by harikb
  • An easy solution is to sell a "web search" subscription add-on that gets distributed to the sites your agents utilize. The script will flip overnight and ASO (agent search optimization) will be born. It could be a form of micropayment system that the internet has desperately needed for over a decade now.
    by WarmWash
  • It’s also a “you can’t scrape us but we can scrape you” mentality these companies are getting into.

    It really sucks for small businesses. Their websites get absolutely hammered and they can’t afford or don’t know how to stop it. Cloudflare ends up winning as they’re the easiest solution.

    by dawnerd

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