Today, I’m talking with Josh Miller, co-founder and CEO of The Browser Company, a relatively new software maker that develops the Arc browser. The company also has a mobile app called Arc Search that does AI summaries of webpages, which puts it right in the middle of a contentious debate in the tech industry around paying web creators for their work.

We’ve been talking about these topics pretty much nonstop for last year here on Decoder. So I was really excited to have Josh on the show to explore why he built Arc, what he hopes it will accomplish, and what might happen to browsers, search engines, and the web itself as these trends evolve.

Links:

Researcher reveals ‘catastrophic’ security flaw in the Arc browser | The Verge
The Arc browser is the Chrome replacement I’ve been waiting for | The Verge
Arc’s mobile browser is here — and it’s not really a web browser at all | The Verge
Arc is getting better bookmarks and search results, all thanks to AI | The Verge
Arc Search combines browser, search engine, and AI into something new | The Verge
Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case | The Verge
Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be Safari’s default search engine | The Verge
One startup's quest to take on Chrome and reinvent the web browser | Protocol
Scenes from a dying web | Platformer
Perplexity’s grand theft AI | The Verge

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/24011410

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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Introduction

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