GitHub - the-ai-coop/open-letter · GitHub

/" data-turbo-transient="true" />

Skip to content

Search or jump to...

Search code, repositories, users, issues, pull requests...

-->

Search

Clear

Search syntax tips

Provide feedback

--><br>We read every piece of feedback, and take your input very seriously.

Include my email address so I can be contacted

Cancel

Submit feedback

Saved searches

Use saved searches to filter your results more quickly

-->

Name

Query

To see all available qualifiers, see our documentation.

Cancel

Create saved search

Sign in

/;ref_cta:Sign up;ref_loc:header logged out"}"<br>Sign up

Appearance settings

Resetting focus

You signed in with another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.<br>You signed out in another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.<br>You switched accounts on another tab or window. Reload to refresh your session.

Dismiss alert

{{ message }}

the-ai-coop

open-letter

Public

Notifications<br>You must be signed in to change notification settings

Fork

Star

main

BranchesTags

Go to file

CodeOpen more actions menu

Folders and files<br>NameNameLast commit message<br>Last commit date<br>Latest commit

History<br>4 Commits<br>4 Commits

README.md

README.md

open-letter-for-your-attention.md

open-letter-for-your-attention.md

open-letter-for-your-attention.md.sha256

open-letter-for-your-attention.md.sha256

View all files

Repository files navigation

An Open Letter for Your Attention

I suddenly realized there is a game being played for control of how humanity accesses information. Very few, if any, even know the game is being played, and I don't think anyone fully comprehends the rules. I hope I'm wrong, but here is the game.

The three layers

To control what people know, you need three things.

You need a browser — the software people use to move through the internet. The browser watches everything. Every search, every click, every page, every moment of hesitation. It is the instrument that measures human attention.

You need a search index — a map of the entire web, updated constantly.

You need an AI — the layer that sits on top of the index and the browser signal and answers questions directly, without showing its work, without sending you anywhere, without letting you judge for yourself.

Own all three and you own the loop. The browser watches what people do. That behavior flows into the index. The index tells the AI what humans find useful. The AI gives better answers. Better answers attract more users. More users generate more signal. The loop closes. No one outside can audit it, replicate it, or offer a genuine alternative.

One company owns this loop for most of the world. Its name is Google.

Google's Chrome browser runs on 65% of the world's devices. Google Search handles 90% of queries outside China and Russia. Gemini sits on top of both. One company. One loop. Three billion people.

Baidu owns the same loop in China. Yandex owns it in Russia.

Everywhere on earth, the loop is closing. And the people whose attention built it own none of it.

What everybody gets wrong about Google's competitors

OpenAI. Anthropic. xAI. Everyone calls them Google's competitors in AI.

They are not Google's competitors. They are Google's customers.

OpenAI has a model. It is frantically building a search index because it has realized it doesn't have one. It has no browser. Anthropic has a model, rents its live search from an independent index it doesn't own, and is partly funded by Google itself. xAI has a model and a social media platform. None of them have the browser. None of them have the closed loop.

Without the browser you cannot watch the session. Without the session you cannot tell whether your AI actually helped someone or just sounded convincing. You can build a model that is articulate, confident, and wrong in ways you will never detect — because you have no instrument to measure whether it served a human being.

This is not a search monopoly. Regulators have spent years prosecuting the wrong case. A 90% search market share is the symptom. The disease is that Google owns the instrument of measurement itself — and has structured three products to ensure no one else ever can.

Here is a thing worth understanding about every "alternative" search engine that doesn't own a browser: it is not actually a search engine. It is a wrapper. DuckDuckGo is Bing with a privacy label. Perplexity is Brave's index with an AI on top. You.com is Bing again. This is not a criticism of those products. It is a structural fact. Without the browser layer, you cannot collect the session signal. Without the session signal, you cannot close the feedback loop. Without the closed loop, your index never improves from human attention — it only improves from whatever the company whose index you're renting decides to share with you. Every search product that doesn't own a browser is permanently, architecturally, a tenant. The rent can go up. The lease can be cancelled. There is no...