Internet as AI’s agar culture

The internet should be seen as the biological 'agar' that incubated AI: its scale, diversity, and trace of human behavior created the training substrate and business incentives that allowed modern models to emerge quickly. Recognizing this reframes debates about who benefits from the web (not just users but future algorithmic systems) and where policy should intervene (data governance, platform design, and infrastructure ownership). — If the internet is the foundational substrate for AI, policy must treat web architecture, data flows, and platform incentives as strategic infrastructure — not merely cultural or economic externalities.