Presented at All Things Open AI 2025 Presented by Rachel-Lee Nabors - AgentQL Title: The Death of the Browser Abstract: In ten years, Internet Browsers may be a nostalgic memory. As enterprises face mounting API costs and integration headaches, a new paradigm is emerging. The internet's evolution from an open highway into a maze of walled gardens and monetized APIs has created significant challenges for businesses—but it has also set the stage for accessing and organizing the world’s information. This lightning talk traces our journey from the invention of the browser to the arms race of scraping for data and access to it to the dawn of AI agents, showing how the challenges of today opened the door to tomorrow. See how technologies refined by the web scraping community are combining with large language models to create practical alternatives to costly API integrations. From the rise of platform monopolies to the emergence of AI agents, this timeline-based exploration will help you understand where we've been, where we are, and where we're heading. Join us for a glimpse of how AI agents are enabling a return to the era of free information with the web as the API. Find more info about All Things Open: On the web: https://www.allthingsopen.org/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/AllThingsOpen LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/all-things-open/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allthingsopen/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AllThingsOpen Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@allthingsopen Threads: https://www.threads.net/@allthingsopen Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/allthingsopen.bsky.social 2025 conference: https://2025.allthingsopen.org/