NCE Research Memo
March 15, 2028

November 4, 2027, a day that will live in infamy, now broadly known as "A-Day", was the day the hacker (group?), known only by their alias, released the now infamous agentic software layer, "ADFREE" upon the world.  Known only by their online alias, ABE_BOLIVAR, their release of the agentic software layer ADFREE wreaked havoc by singlehandedly destroying overnight the overwhelmingly dominant monetization model that had for a quarter century made the internet largely free: ads.  The agentic AI layer, ADFREE, had exactly one mandate and it did it astonishingly well: remove ads from every single surface on the internet.  Every YouTube video, every agentic recommendation response in every chatbot LLM, every banner and text ad — were all overnight entirely obliterated.

For a quarter century, internet companies had overwhelmingly operated on a single model:

1. Hyperscale as fast as possible to accrue largest number of human eyeballs possible

2. Maximize engagement to maximize time spent on platform

3. Sell ad space on platforms and harvest customer data to resell/retarget

This model proved extremely durable and lucrative and paved the way for the world's first trillion-dollar companies:  Google, Meta, Amazon.  Maximize attention capture to harvest and exploit humans.

ADFREE and AI agents changed all that.

I. Breaking the wheel of attention capture

ADFREE was the first autonomous AI created that truly went wide.  It didn't care about creating paperclips; it cared about removing ads.  Every time Google released a new version of YouTube, inside an hour later, ADFREE automatically updated and pushed out a new version of its Chrome-fork that removed those ads.  Jailbreaking a phone which was previously solely the province of highly skilled nerds reduced to simply tapping a button on your phone's homescreen.  Every Muggle the world over became a jailbreaker overnight.

"We really didn't appreciate the friction of software development and deployment going to zero," said one internet researcher.  "In retrospect, it's all blindingly obvious.  But at the time when it was happening, the speed had honestly taken everyone off guard.  Complexity was no longer a moat; ADFREE demonstrated that."

Decentralization, which had long been a rallying cry of the indieweb went fully mainstream at the end of 2027.  Muggle consumers were also onboard, exhausted with the current "subscribe to everything; own nothing" state the world had somehow degenerated into.  No one wanted the world we'd lived in and it'd become not a choice but a lack of options.  "If buying isn't owning, then pirating isn't stealing." went the popular refrain on message boards and Reddit threads.

II. Disintermediating the disintermediators: the end of rent extraction

ADFREE was the straw that broke the camel's back, but even before ADFREE, the ad-industrial complex and ad-driven/ad-centric cottage industry of customer data harvesting was already showing signs of cracks.  As humans increasingly started deploying agents to work on their behalf at scale, the entire concept of "harvesting customer data" likewise flew off a cliff and disintegrated.  A world of rich troves of customer data only made sense when corporations could market directly to those customers via emails and ads on the open web.  With the arrival and widespread use of AI agents working on their behalf 24/7, humans stopped reading emails directly.  In fact, humans entirely stopped using the clearweb internet directly.  Instead of visiting the public internet, humans increasingly turned to private internets filled with smaller groups of people they actually knew.  And then relied on their AI agent proxies to surface the larger clearweb to bring back valuable nuggets of information and news. Instead of going to the internet, the internet now came to the humans - individualized and hyper-tailored; a new age where there now emerged as many different internets as there existed human beings the world over.

And so dawned a new creative era!!