Amid rising electric bills, states are under pressure to insulate regular household and business ratepayers from the costs of feeding Big Tech’s energy-hungry data centers.
It saves them money in the same sense it saves every other information source money, it reduces traffic. But just like other sites can’t serve ads without traffic, Wikipedia can’t prove its worth and ask for donations without traffic. Eventually, people will start asking themselves why they need to support Wikipedia when Google’s AI tells them everything they need to know, unaware that Google’s AI can only do so because it scrapes Wikipedia without paying for it.
In the case of Wikipedia, it saves them money
It saves them money in the same sense it saves every other information source money, it reduces traffic. But just like other sites can’t serve ads without traffic, Wikipedia can’t prove its worth and ask for donations without traffic. Eventually, people will start asking themselves why they need to support Wikipedia when Google’s AI tells them everything they need to know, unaware that Google’s AI can only do so because it scrapes Wikipedia without paying for it.