Comment by jsheard

The fight against spam email also led to mass consolidation of what was supposed to be a decentralised system though. Monoliths like Google and Microsoft now act as de-facto gatekeepers who decide whether or not you're allowed to send emails, and there's little to no transparency or recourse to their decisions.

There's probably an analogy to be made about the open decentralised internet in the age of AI here, if it gets to the point that search engines have to assume all sites are spam by default until proven otherwise, much like how an email server is assumed guilty until proven innocent.