How Mozilla hopes to stop the ENSHITTIFICATION of the internet

AI is already disrupting the web as we know it, but that could offer an opportunity to build a better way of working, argue speakers at this year's Mozilla Festival. Nicole Kobie reports from Barcelona

- By Nicole Kobie reports from Barcelona

The next five years could see dramatic change on the web, as AI disrupts Google's dominance in search, sparks a new browser war and exacerbates privacy invasions and digital surveillance.

Or we could take the opportunity to build a better web. That's what Mozilla is hoping to do – and has been for some time. After all, the Firefox maker has been toiling away at the goal since 1998, offering a browser that promises to prioritise privacy more than rivals whilst supporting open-source projects – though it's also worth noting that the nonprofit is largely funded by its leading rival, Google.

Why is now such a key moment? AI chatbots offer an alternative to traditional search, while AI-generated summaries are shaking up search, changing how we interact with the web – and who makes money online from lucrative search ads. Plus, AI developers are building their own browsers, sparking the possibility of a fresh browser war, and influencers and meme-makers alike are flooding social media with AI slop.

“I think this is the moment,” Nabiha Syed, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation told me at the organisation's annual conference. “Because what AI did, in such a tumultuous way two years ago, is bring to the fore conversations that scholars and close watchers... already knew,” she said, and that's the fact we don't have any agency online and our behaviour, preferences and data is being mined and extracted for financial benefit. “I think what the AI conversation did is drove it forward, brought it home in a way that felt like ‘I have got skin in the game’,” she said.

But it remains early days when it comes to AI's potential disruption of the web. If any of these predictions prove true in the longer term, the upheaval so far has been light – which is one way of saying Google's share of the browser market and search hasn't fallen at all, and we're still scrolling through social media as much as ever.