Automattic's 'Code for the People' makes the case for an open internet before the walled gardens close

On 8 July 2026, Variety published a feature on "Code for the People," a new documentary produced by Automattic — the commercial steward of WordPress — that frames the contemporary internet as a contest between a user-controlled open web and a smaller set of closed platforms whose business models depend on locking people inside. The film, Variety reports, is positioned as both a diagnosis and a rallying call: the threats named are corporate walled gardens, the consolidation of user data into a handful of firms, and the rise of what the documentary describes as "black-box AI" systems that mediate access to information without exposing their workings.

The argument the documentary is marshalling is older than the documentary itself, but the timing is deliberate. The pitch for an open internet has rarely been louder, nor has it so often been made by the very companies competing against the platforms they want to break open. That tension is the story.

What the film argues

According to Variety's description of "Code for the People," the documentary treats the open web not as a nostalgia project but as a working infrastructure under pressure. The free and open internet, the film contends, is being eroded by companies building walled gardens designed to control user data and by AI systems that increasingly intermediate how people find and read information, with little visibility into how those systems rank, filter, or synthesise content. The proposed counter-move is collective: keep the underlying code, the publishing tools, and the data portability paths in the hands of the people who use them, rather than the platforms that host them.

Automattic's commercial interest in that position is obvious. WordPress powers a substantial share of the public web; the company's case for an open, user-controlled internet aligns, neatly, with the company's case for Automattic itself. Readers should hold both facts in mind at once.

The closed-web counter-narrative

The dominant platforms would frame the story differently. From their vantage point, curation, recommendation, and AI-mediated retrieval are not closures but conveniences — an answer to the noise of an open web that has, in their telling, become unsearchable, flooded with low-quality material, and exhausting to navigate without an intermediary. The economic argument runs that the trade-off the documentary criticises — data, attention, and behavioural insight exchanged for frictionless service — is what funds the very infrastructure most users want. Without it, the argument goes, the open web does not become freer; it becomes less usable.

That case has real evidentiary backing in the experience of any independent publisher who has watched organic reach migrate from search and direct visits into platform feeds, where the rules of distribution are owned by someone else. The closed platforms are also correct that the open web has a quality problem and that intermediaries do, in fact, provide a service.

What the open-web camp is contesting is not the existence of intermediaries but their opacity, their consolidation, and the leverage asymmetry those qualities create between the user and the platform. The argument is not "no platforms." The argument is "no monopolies by default."

A structural shift in how the web is intermediated

Beneath the documentary's polemic sits a structural change that deserves plain-language description. For most of the public web's commercial life, a small number of search engines acted as the dominant gateway between publishers and readers; users could in principle click through to any site, and sites could in principle be optimised for the algorithm. That model was already imperfect, but it left publishers and readers with at least the theoretical ability to exit the gateway.

The newer pattern replaces search with a smaller set of generative interfaces — chat-style assistants, AI overviews, embedded copilots — that return an answer rather than a list of links. When the gateway stops handing out traffic and starts answering the question, the open web's economic model is hollowed out at the source. Publishers lose the visit that funded the page; readers lose the chance to evaluate the source for themselves; the platform that owns the gateway gains the relationship. That is the structural stake of the AI-era open-web debate, distinct from the older privacy-versus-convenience debate that defined the 2010s.

What is at stake, and what remains contested

The film lands at a moment when regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are re-litigating questions of platform power, data portability, and AI transparency — a debate whose outcome will determine whether the documentary's prescriptions feel radical or redundant in five years. The optimistic reading is that "Code for the People" accelerates a coalition: independent publishers, open-source developers, civil-society groups, and any user who has ever felt locked into a default. The pessimistic reading is that a documentary funded by one of the open web's largest commercial beneficiaries will be heard, accurately or not, as a competitor's complaint — and that even with broad sympathy for the underlying argument, the public will not move from sympathy to action without a clearer ask.

Two uncertainties are worth naming. The first is whether the AI systems the film criticises can be made genuinely interpretable rather than merely accountable in form. The second is whether an open-web coalition of publishers, developers, and users can scale beyond shared rhetoric into durable infrastructure — payment rails, identity, decentralised discovery — that gives users a real exit from the gates they currently pass through. The documentary makes the case that this fight is winnable. It does not, and cannot, settle whether it will be won.

This publication treated "Code for the People" less as a film review and more as a campaign launch — surfacing Automattic's commercial interest in the position it advocates, while giving weight to the closed-platform counter-argument that curation and AI intermediation solve real navigation problems on the open web. The structural stake identified is the shift from search-gateway economics to AI-answer economics, which the documentary flags but does not fully resolve.