Internet’s Silent Coup

“I wish we could filter posts by

AI bots or humans. Sadly,

soon, you won’t know if you are

talking to a human or a bot.”

— Vijay Shekhar Sharma

At some point, without ceremony or countdown clocks, the Internet tipped. Not in who uses it, but in who occupies it. As many unsettling ideas do, this truth too dawned on most people with a statistic quietly circulating online, one that industrialist Anand Mahindra recently flagged: Humans account for just 38.5 per cent of global Internet traffic. The remainder comes from bots, automatons, crawlers, scrapers, crypto-miners and software designed to impersonate people. Mahindra was not alone in drawing attention to this number. Cybersecurity firms, infrastructure companies, AI researchers and platform guardians have been circling just such a conclusion for a while now. The Internet has crossed a threshold. Machines are no longer peripheral users of the web. They are its dominant occupants.

To be truthful, this inversion feels counterintuitive. Nearly 5 billion people, about 63 per cent of global population, are online today. Digital connectivity has never been broader. Yet, when measured by traffic (the web’s basic currency), human activity is a minority signal in a machine-heavy system. This gap between perception and reality matters. Because traffic shapes everything. It determines what content is promoted, what businesses are valued, what voices are amplified and what behaviours are rewarded. And which ones are not. When machines begin to dominate this flow, the Internet begins to tilt, subtly but decisively so, away from human priorities. This has happened. The circle is complete.

Machines Do the Talking

For years, automated traffic lived in the background. Search engines indexed pages. Monitoring tools checked uptime. Security systems probed defences. These were functional, largely invisible processes that kept the web running. What has changed now, you ask? Well, intent and intelligence have. Global infrastructure providers like Cloudflare and Akamai reveal bot traffic has surged over the last two years, driven by advances in generative AI and automation. And they are not crude scripts hammering away on servers. Today’s bots are smart enough to browse websites like humans, rotate identities, write text, fill forms, even engage in conversations. Some are helpful. Most are not.

Security analysts routinely describe the Internet as an environment where machines increasingly talk to other machines, optimising, negotiating, scraping, attacking and defending; and all often at speeds and scales far beyond human comprehension or capability. India is firmly inside this shift. Recent analyses show a sharp rise in AI-driven bot activity across Asia-Pacific, with India featuring prominently due to its fast-growing digital economy and vast surface area of online services. Scale, once an advantage, has become a target. And a damn attractive one.

The result is an Internet that feels busy, noisy, hyperactive… And oddly hollow.

Erosion of Authenticity

The machine-heavy web has consequences that go beyond bandwidth charts. Researchers studying online behaviour document how automated accounts distort engagement metrics, inflate trends and manipulate discourse, particularly on social media platforms. Bots don’t just spread misinformation; they manufacture relevance. They make ideas appear popular, controversial or urgent, regardless of whether real people care.

This dynamic has fuelled renewed interest in what was once dismissed as the ‘dead Internet’ theory. This stemmed from the idea that much of what we see online is synthetic, recycled or algorithmically generated, rather than truly human. While the phrase may be provocative, the concern is increasingly mainstream.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, has repeatedly warned that a web dominated by AI-generated content and automated interaction could arrive sooner than expected. Researchers tracking online publishing note that human-written pages are declining, while AI-generated material designed for search optimisation and engagement farming is proliferating. The risk is not that humans may disappear from the Internet. It is that human presence will slowly become indistinguishable from machine output, and, therefore devalued.

Digital Economic Fallout

Nowhere is this distortion more visible than in the digital economy. Advertising, the internet’s financial engine, runs on metrics. Views, clicks, impressions, engagement rates… When any bot inflates these numbers, money flows toward illusion. Advertisers pay for attention that never belonged to a person. Brands optimise campaigns for audiences that do not exist. Industry estimates suggest that losses from bot-driven ad fraud run into hundreds of billions of dollars globally each year. But the deeper damage is structural. When businesses can no longer trust digital signals, confidence erodes across the ecosystem.

For India, this is not a marginal concern. As one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets – spanning fintech, commerce, media, gaming and public digital platforms – India relies heavily on scale and trust. A web saturated with automated noise undermines both. What begins as a technical issue quickly becomes an economic one.

There is also a quieter, more troubling shift underway. Bots do not only generate traffic; they harvest value. Automated systems scrape articles, images, videos, comments and conversations at industrial scale. This material feeds AI models that then generate derivative content, often competing directly with the creators whose work trained them. Thus, publishers, journalists, artists and writers across the world are now battling this reality. Their labour fuels systems that neither credit nor compensate them. The Internet’s promise of participation is giving way to an extraction economy, where human creativity becomes raw input.

This has sparked legal, ethical, and policy debates globally. Who owns digital labour? What constitutes fair use in an age of AI? And how do societies protect creators when machines can replicate style, tone, and output at negligible cost? These questions are no longer theoretical. They are reshaping the web in real time.

Hobson’s Choice for India

India stands at a pivotal moment in this transition. The country has demonstrated, through its public digital infrastructure, that technology can be deployed at scale while serving human needs, ranging from digital identity to instant payments. But the rise of a machine-dominated Internet poses a new governance challenge. Data protection laws, platform regulations and emerging AI frameworks must grapple not just with content and privacy, but with who the Internet is now optimised for. Traffic itself becomes a site of power.

India has the option of pushing for a global conversation that reasserts human primacy online, thereby protecting creators, demanding transparency around automated activity and designing systems that reward genuine participation over synthetic volume. Or India can wait and watch, wondering whether not just its own people, but if the entire human race is losing the Internet.

The honest answer is ‘Not Yet’. But it is a slippery slope. For machines bring in efficiency, speed and scale. They are indispensable. But when optimisation becomes the sole objective, meaning is the first casualty. An Internet built primarily for machines risks becoming efficient, profitable and profoundly alienating. The challenge ahead is not to eliminate automation, but to rebalance the web. To ensure that technology serves human intent rather than displace it. And to build safeguards that preserve authenticity in an age of imitation.

The statistic Anand Mahindra highlighted resonates not because it is shocking, but because it feels true. It captures a shift many users sense quite instinctively: that the Internet feels louder, faster, less human. Whether it stays that way is a choice. And choices, unlike algorithms, are still ours to make.

The writer can be reached on narayanrajeev2006@gmail.com. Views expressed are personal. The writer is a veteran journalist and communications specialist