> This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI.

I was reading The Victorian Internet [0] in the late 2000s and the author mentioned how the telegraph killed off a lot of small local newspapers. The reasoning was that who cares about local news when you can instantly get international news from around the world.

This was so topical for that time period that I assumed it had been written a few years earlier e.g. 2006. Turns out it was written in 1998!

0 - https://link.amazon/B0bh3AKaw