Defeating Tech Giants With Open Protocols, Interoperability, And Shared Stewardship

from the alternative-approaches dept

Across the ideological spectrum, there seems to be a consensus that something must be done about the biggest tech companies — that the legal mechanisms we currently have to address monopolization in the United States are inadequate to deal with the realities of the digital market. While recognizing how powerless our institutions have become in the face of Big Tech's massive lobbying power, there's an idea that's gaining traction as a viable approach to curb the societal and economic impacts of tech monopolies. The idea is to restore the core of a healthy internet ecosystem: interoperability and the revival of open protocols.

Lawmakers, policy experts, and even Twitter, are advocating for tech companies to open up their platforms to enable other services and start-ups to enter the playing field. There are different approaches to doing so and varying layers of interoperability that are possible. The overarching goal, however, would be to get rid of the worst aspects of tech monopolization and bring about a new era of competition and innovation.

As a writer and nonprofit tech entrepreneur who has focused on projects promoting digital justice and community networks, I became interested in these ideas. Why do we need to extend interoperability into the application layer? How do we create new Internet standards that open up our networks and platforms in ways that invite new features and applications that better respect our individual and collective rights online? As I examined the three most likely scenarios being discussed, I realized that we had much to learn from the past. We need to revive the power of standards bodies, and ensure that they stay relevant and effective by observing known principles about how to successfully govern a commons.

A Brief Overview of Interoperability and Competition

What made the early Internet so exciting was how quickly it changed. Different services like bulletin board systems (BBS), email, and Internet relay chat (IRC) came about and allowed people to communicate in ways that were impossible before. That rich ecosystem of tools and services were enabled by downstream innovation. New applications and features could be built with existing technologies with or without permission from the prevailing tech companies. Yes, there were plenty of lawsuits against these start-ups back then. But people were still willing to take the risk, and there were investors that wanted to back them up. There were less onerous laws hindering experimental technologies.

Perhaps most importantly, much of the Internet ran on open protocols and standards. The academics and others who initially designed the protocols wanted to build a relatively free ecosystem, so they made it possible for services to interoperate with each other. Standards bodies like the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) established shared protocols in the name of the collective interest. These institutions have helped companies and organizations come together and set rules based on agreed upon needs, making them transparent and representative of the interests of more than one stakeholder. At standards bodies, companies sit alongside non-profit organizations, educational institutions, policy experts, and academics.

But standards bodies have grown increasingly inefficient and exploitable. Not only were they always slow and under-resourced, tech companies grew powerful enough to bend them to their will or ignore them altogether by building walled gardens with no interoperability built into their platform (besides providing some public APIs with varying levels of consistency). In the era of Move Fast and Break Things, there was little patience for the kind of multi-stakeholder dialogue and decision-making that is required to build and conform to shared technical standards.

There has been little incentive for tech companies to play well with others. Not only that, it's become the norm for tech monopolies to destroy any competition. Laws that regulate the internet such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) have had a chilling effect on the types of innovation that was characteristic of the early internet. These regulations can be weaponized by big players to crush new start-ups over even the most trivial violations. If they don’t sue them, tech companies can easily buy them out or throw all their resources into imitating the services of their smaller competitors until they crush them.

Now most people communicate, get news, and publish their work through closed platforms run as web services. When people think of the Internet, they think about the platforms, not the protocols that run beneath them and make them work. To many, email is Gmail, chat is Slack, and discussion forums are Facebook.

Of course the underlying protocols are still core to the Internet’s functionality. But these closed platforms severely lack the traits of interoperability. As we’ve become dependent on them, our digital lives have been left at the mercy of companies whose primary goal is to enclose as much of the Internet’s infrastructure as they can get away with. Especially when it comes to social networks, their ability to mediate every aspect of our relationships and interactions online has come at an immense cost to our right to free expression, privacy, and access to knowledge.

Possible Paths Towards an Interoperable Internet

There are those who are calling for a revival of antitrust enforcement to break up the tech monopolies. But federal agencies in the U.S. such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) move too slowly and are under-resourced. And then there are others who say that breaking up the tech companies is entirely the wrong approach — that we need to build protocols to again make the Internet more interoperable as it was in the early days.

The European Commission, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Mozilla, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and others are calling for a revival of interoperability as means to address Big Tech's dominance over the Internet. Among them they present three possible ways this could come about, with or without state intervention.

1) State Antitrust Enforcement

Through litigation or legislative action, the state could require companies to make their platforms more open and interoperable. Mozilla's Chris Riley asserts that the agency best suited to take this on would be the FTC, which has the explicit mandate to protect consumer protection and enforce U.S. antitrust laws. Harold Feld of Public Knowledge calls for an entirely new agency empowered to oversee any implementation of any proposed law enforcing digital platform competition, given the specific technical complexities of enforcing such a law.

There is precedence for this in Europe. The European Commission brought a case against Microsoft in the early 2000's that resulted in the company being required to release information enabling competing software to interoperate with Windows desktops. The U.S. and Europe have their own approaches to antitrust, of course. Interoperability enforcement would look very different depending on which state(s) had the mandate to move forward with this type of action.

2) Established Platform Companies Seek Standardization

One of the big players could willingly embark on a path to build open protocols. In December, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced Blue Sky, an initiative to help develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. In his Twitter thread about the project, Dorsey says that Twitter would fund further development of an existing decentralized standard or as he says, "create one from scratch".

Many responded to him asking about ActivityPub — the protocol behind Mastodon, the federated alternative to Twitter. Why wouldn't Twitter invest its resources into that? Dorsey responded that it might be possible, but that it's up to the Blue Sky team to decide whether that protocol would be best. It's worth pointing out that ActivityPub has already gone through discussions at the W3C and is officially a recommended standard.

It makes sense that a major platform would want to decentralize their platform, the most obvious reason being to relieve themselves of the responsibility over content moderation. The second reason is to fortify itself against even bigger competitors, like Facebook, that threaten to enclose even more of the Internet.

3) Building Open Protocols from Scratch

Within the last seven years there's been an explosion of decentralized protocols, dealing with everything ranging from currency and commerce to social media and decision-making. We are way beyond the proof of concept stage. There are all kinds of ways to build decentralized protocols — based on gossip, distributed files, blockchains, or federated databases. The issue isn't whether decentralization is technically feasible. The issue is that there are so many ways to do it and how each protocol is appropriate for different use cases.

Developer and writer Jay Graber compared a few of the most well-known decentralized social network protocols. She explains the pros and cons of each protocol and how they operate. Protocols that put users in full control over their data and identity in a network can be too technically challenging for the average user. Protocols that rely on append-only logs, such as secure scuttlebutt, make it impossible to edit or delete posts. Federated networks can carry many of the same user-friendly features as centralized networks, but still leave the server administrators hosting the network with the same challenges — such as overseeing content moderation and platform security. So while protocols can be more neutral than platforms they still contain biases.

This Is a Human Problem, Not a Technical One

If we're talking about interoperability, we're talking about public Internet infrastructure. Open protocols and standards are part of a digital commons, and a commons thrives when people use and maintain it together.

As economist Elinor Ostrom declared in her Nobel Prize winning work, commoning is a social practice. What Ostrom asserted was that the success or failure of a commons, or what she called a "common-pool resource", rested on "how a group of principals who are in an interdependent situation can organize and govern themselves to obtain continuing joint benefits when all face temptations to free-ride, shirk or otherwise act opportunistically." For any type of commons, it's the relationships between those governing and relying on shared resources together that's central to its success.

Standards bodies were in many ways an implementation of Ostrom's eight principles for a commons — what she found were the basic elements needed for a commons to be governed sustainability and equitably. Thus Dorsey's call to build an "open community" around a new social media protocol is encouraging. It suggests the need to build organizations that keep various stakeholders engaged in an open dialogue about how we make social networks open and interoperable. This is the promise of a functional standards body. When they’re robust and effective, they can play a critical role in ensuring that the Internet remains free, open, and equitable.

Overcoming the Challenges

It's exciting to see this resurgence of energy for greater interoperability. But I'm not going to let myself get too hopeful. Anyone involved in this project needs to prove that this is going to be done right. Whether due to state-driven antitrust enforcement, tech companies' self-motivation, or from the bottom up with a new decentralized protocol, the manner in which protocols come about will be critical.

There are foreseeable issues with all three paths towards interoperability. Even if the government were to regulate companies, the state is feeble in the face of overpowering influence from corporate lobbyists. The revolving door that exists between private industry and public oversight bodies nearly guarantees a compromised process. Companies can't be trusted either. Independent developers have been continually burned by companies being unpredictable and negligent regarding the availability of public APIs — not to mention the hundreds of other ways they've violated public trust. Finally, nearly all of the decentralized web protocols were built by lone geniuses who collectively represent one demographic. If new protocols are to address the needs of diverse online communities, more types of people will need to be involved in their development.

Internet interoperability cannot be a project embarked on for the sake of profit, power, or someone's ego. Who is or is not in the room when critical decisions are being made about the protocol will make or break whether it will succeed in bringing about a more interoperable internet. We ought to learn from experts who know what it takes to govern shared resources together. If we’re serious about re-building the Internet as public infrastructure, we need to be prudent enough to assemble the types of organizations that can steward the Internet protocols of the future.

—

Further Reading

• European Commission, "Competition Policy for the Digital Era" (April 2019)   

• Mozilla's "A framework for forward-looking tech competition policy" (September    2019)

• Jack Dorsey, a twitter thread on Twitter's bluesky project

• George J. Stigler, Center for the Study of the Economy and the State "Committee    for the Study of Digital Platforms: Market Structure and Antitrust Subcommittee" (May    2019)

• Harold Feld, Public Knowledge "The    Case for the Digital Platform Act"

• Mike Masnick, Knight Foundation "Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech" (August 2019)

• Cory Doctorow, Electronic Frontier Foundation "Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today's Monopolies"    (June 2019)

• Chinmayi Sharma, University of Virginia School of Law “Concentrated Digital Markets, Restrictive APIs, and the Fight For Internet Interoperability” (January 2020)

• Irina Bolychevsky, Redecentralize "Instead of breaking up big tech, let’s break them open" (October 2019)

Filed Under: big tech, communities, competition, infrastructure, interoperability, platforms, protocols
Companies: facebook, google

Protocols Instead Of Platforms: Rethinking Reddit, Twitter, Moderation And Free Speech

from the protocols-not-platforms dept

Right. By now you've heard about Reddit's new content moderation policy, which (in short) is basically that it will continue to ban illegal stuff, and then work hard to make "unpleasant" stuff harder to find. There is an awful lot of devil in very few details, mainly around the rather vague "I know it when I see it" standards being applied. So far, I've seen two kinds of general reactions, neither of which really make that much sense to me. You have the free speech absolutists who (incorrectly) think that a right to free speech should mean a right to bother others with their free speech. They're upset about any kind of moderation at all (though, apparently at least some are relieved that racist content won't be hidden entirely). On the flip side, there's lots and lots and lots of moralizing about how Reddit should just outright ban "bad" content.

I think both points of view are a little simplistic. It's easy to say that you "know" bad content when you see it, but then you end up in crazy lawsuits like the one we just discussed up in Canada, where deciding what's good and what's bad seems to be very, very subjective.

I'm a big supporter of free speech, period. No "but." I also worry about what it means for freedom of expression when everyone has to rely on intermediaries to "allow" that expression to occur. At the same time, I recognize that platforms have their own free speech rights to moderate what content appears on that platform. And also that having no moderation at all often leads to platforms being overrun and becoming useless -- starting with spam and, if a platform gets large enough, trollish behavior or other immature behavior that drives away more intelligent and inspired debate. This is different than arguing that certain content shouldn't be spoken or shouldn't be allowed to be spoken -- it's just that maybe it does not belong in a particular community. Obligatory xkcd: So Reddit is free to do what it wants, and Reddit's users are free to do what they want in response, It's a grand experiment in learning what everyone values in the long run. People will write about it for years.

However, in thinking about all of this (and the similar struggles that Twitter, in particular, has been having), I've been wondering if perhaps the problem is when we put the burden of "protecting free speech" on platforms, when that's not the best role for those platforms. The various platforms serve a variety of different purposes, all of which seem to get conflated into one larger purpose. They are places to post content (express), for one, but also a place to connect as well as a place for discoverability of the content.

And if we're serious about protecting free expression, perhaps those things should be separated. Here's a thought experiment that is only half baked (and I'm hoping many of you help continue the baking in the comments below). What if, instead of being full stack platforms for all of those things, they were split into a protocol for the expression, which was open and distributed, and then the company could continue to play the other roles of connecting and helping with discoverability. This isn't necessarily an entirely crazy idea. Ryan Charles, who worked at Reddit for a period of time, notes that he was hired to build such a thing, and is apparently trying to do so again outside of the company. And plenty of people have discussed building a distributed Twitter for years.

But here's the big question. In such a scenario is there still room for Reddit or Twitter the company, if they no longer host the content themselves? I'd argue yes and, in fact, that it could strengthen the business models for both, though while opening them up to more competition (which would be a challenge).

Think of it this way: if they were designed as protocols, where you could publish the content wherever you want -- including on platforms that you, yourself, control, then people would be free to speak their mind as they see fit using these tools. And that's great. But, then, the companies would just act as more centralized sources to curate and connect -- and it could be done in different ways by different companies. Think of it like HTTP and Google. Via HTTP anyone can publish whatever they want on the web, and Google then acts to make it findable via search.

In this world that we talk about, anyone could publish links or content via an Open Reddit Post Protocol (ORPP) or Open Tweet Protocol (OTP) and that includes the ability to push that content to the Corporate Reddit or the Corporate Twitter (or any other competitors that spring up). And then the platform companies can decide how they want to handle things. If they want a nice pure and clean Reddit where only good stuff and happy discussions occur, they can create that. Those who want angry political debates can set up their own platform that will accept that kind of content. In short, the content can still be expressed, but individuals effectively get to choose whose filtering and discoverability system they prefer. If a site becomes too aggressive, or not aggressive enough, then people can migrate as necessary.

This isn't necessarily a perfect solution by any means. And I'm sure it raises lots of other problems and challenges. And the companies doing the filtering and the discoverability will still face all sorts of questions about how they want to make those choices. Are they looking to pretend that ignorant angry people don't exist in the world? Or are they looking to provide forums to teach angry ignorant people not to be so angry and ignorant? Or do they want to be a forum just for angry ignorant people that the rest of the internet would prefer to, as xkcd notes, show the door.

And, of course, this would eventually lead to more questions about intermediary liability. Already we see these fights where people blame Google for the content that Google finds, even when it's hosted on other sites. If this sort of model really took off and there were really successful companies handling the filtering/discoverability portions, it's not hard to predict lawsuits arguing that it should be illegal for companies to link to certain content. But that's a different kind of battle.

Either way, this seems like a potential scenario that doesn't end up with one of the two extremes of either "all content must be allowed on these platforms even if it's being overrun by trolls and spam" or "we only let nice people talk around here." Because neither is a world that is particularly fun to think about.

Filed Under: communities, free speech, moderation, platforms, protocols
Companies: reddit, twitter

Taiwan's g0v: Using Open-Source Code And Communities To Engage Citizens And Make Government More Open

from the building-on-sunflowers dept

Back in April, we wrote about massive protests that took place in Taiwan as a result of a lack of transparency during trade negotiations with mainland China. Those protests became part of what is now known as the Sunflower student movement, whose name refers to the use of sunflowers by the protesters as a symbol of hope. Techpresident has a fascinating article looking at the Taiwanese online community called g0v, which has been playing a key part in the Sunflower movement, and which is now trying to make government more open and accessible using open source tools:

g0v believes that current online participation tools like social media outlets and online message boards fell short in creating offline action or collaboration. g0v places itself at the center of open-sourced, hands-on, and public-spirited activism with a desire to engage citizens to create real social change.

g0v's work is proving that open-source communities can successfully open up and improve government. Ideologically, g0v does not believe that its activism needs to create an enemy out of government, but rather that everyone -- the government and the people -- wins when creative solutions improve existing public structures.

The post goes on to describe g0v's hackathons, its first conference, and the Open Political Donation Project. This brought together 9,000 volunteers to digitize 300,000 political donation records as a pointed response to Taiwan's old Campaign Donation Act of 2004, which allowed the public access to campaign donation documents, but only as a paper copy, or in person at a government office.

What's fascinating here is to see how the people involved in the Sunflower student movement have moved on from simply protesting against something -- Taiwan's secret trade negotiations with China -- to creating new tools to open up government and engage citizens. As the Techpresident piece concludes:

g0v's brand of activism is about making sure government does its job better. g0v explains on its website, it substituted the "o" in gov for a "0" to change the way we see government working. Through civic tech, hacktivism, and a belief that government can and should work, g0v is already showing that it can change the way that government sees itself and the way that people can interact with their government.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Filed Under: activists, communities, engagement, g0v, open government, politics, taiwan

Jon Stewart Promises To Study Up On SOPA

from the internet-has-asked... dept

Well, this is kind of cool. A Reddit user got some VIP passes to go see the taping of The Daily Show on Wednesday evening... and asked Reddit what he should ask Jon Stewart about SOPA/PIPA if he could. And... at the pre-show Q&A, he was able to say:

"the internet sent me to ask you what you think of SOPA and why you haven't mentioned it on the show."

Stewart basically admitted he hadn't heard of it, asked if it had anything to do with net neutrality, and then admitted that they all "had their heads up their asses" due to focusing on election stuff. However, he apparently also looked at one of the show's writers, and promised to research the issue.

And then... in the opening to the show Stewart actually cracked a joke about it (video below), where he joked that the next night's guest would be "the internet" and then said "we'll be all SOPA what?!?" and then noted:

Here's all I'll say about that: I've got some reading to catch up on...

Please do, Jon. Please do.

Filed Under: communities, jon stewart, pipa, politics, protect ip, sopa, the daily show
Companies: reddit, viacom

Reddit's Altruism Compared To 4chan's Trollism

from the but-are-they-the-same-people? dept

There's a wonderful saying that I keep seeing get passed around lately, that:

Reddit makes me like people I've never met, while Facebook makes me hate people I know in real life.

While I believe the quote actually started with Twitter in place of Reddit, there's certainly an element of truth there (no matter which service you're talking about). Mathew Ingram points us to an excellent listing of some amazing stories of altruism performed by the Reddit community. The post lists out 25 separate -- and often quite amazing -- stories of true altruism from the Reddit community. It's really quite an uplifting piece, and if you've spent time in the Reddit community, you're sure to recognize many of these stories.

It's also a nice antidote to all the claims we hear from people who think that the "online mobs" out there only perform acts of malice and attacks. Of course, stories of such things are often dominated by stories of sites like 4chan. But what really strikes me about all of this is that in my experience, it often feels like there are many of the same people who hang out on both sites. While I'm sure there are many who spend time on one or the other, in the Venn Diagram of both communities, I would imagine there's a fair bit of overlap. And yet, people always talk about how the 4chan (mainly /b/) community is the worst of the worst when it comes to doing despicable things, and here's a situation in which perhaps the very same people are seen doing amazing things. There's even one "crossover" story, involving a situation that originated on 4chan, where someone had posted an image of an upcoming 90th birthday party of a guy who... looked a bit lonely in the picture (his family later denied this...). However, both the 4chan and the Reddit communities jumped onto this and decided to "cheer the guy up," sending him tons of presents, and even having a bunch of folks (from both communities) show up at his party.

I'm not sure exactly what this all means, but it does seem like the rather simplistic story you often hear in the media about the "hurtful" nature of online communities is often ignoring that the very same people can be amazingly helpful at times as well.

Filed Under: 4chan, altruism, communities, reddit, trolling
Companies: 4chan, reddit

Dear Newspapers: Focus On Enabling Your Community; Not Whining About Who Owes You Money

from the trying-this-again dept

There have been a whole series of stories lately, often from newspaper industry insiders, bemoaning the sorry state of their industry. Obviously, we've been seeing (and pointing to) similar stories for a few years now, but their pace has accelerated in the last few months -- with a pretty clear trend: blame others for the newspaper industry ills (the internet! Google! Craiglist! those darn kids! etc.), and then work out some totally hypothetical model that will somehow force someone else to pay, rather than give people a reason to buy. This distinction is pretty important.

Take, for example, this column by Gary Storch, explaining why newspapers need to start charging online. Media mogul Steven Brill is also arguing the same thing (which is doubly amusing since Brill tried and failed to get people to pay for content online). I won't go through the long list of arguments of why that's silly (that's been done before), but just note that the focus is on "newspapers need to charge," and not on "what can we provide that someone's willing to pay for." That's rather important, because it's pretty clear that just charging for news won't get enough people to pay. Next up, is Peter Orsig's rather confused demand that Google rescue newspapers (again, not a new idea by any means). That column had numerous factual problems -- torn to shreds nicely by both Mark Potts and Mathew Ingram. Again, though, the issue is that the focus is on just getting someone else (Google, instead of readers this time) to hand over money, rather than figuring out a way to improve their product in a way that anyone would choose willingly to give them money.

This theme seems to run through much of the discussion around newspapers and business models. Even as they're doing a better and job attracting an online audience, you almost never hear of newspapers looking for ways to better serve that community in a manner that offers up things they want to pay for. Instead, it's all about coming up with ways to demand money, as if it's something they're owed. They're not, and they're discovering that day by day, even if they're unwilling to admit it.

It's time for newspapers to start looking at ways they can add value and give someone, whether individuals, sponsors or others, a good reason to give them money. So far they're failing, and a big part why is that they still view their readers as an "audience" rather than a community. That's why they do little to enable that community to do more, instead focusing on passing down the word from on high. That's not how communities work, and the end result is the mess that so many newspapers are facing today.

Filed Under: business models, communities, newspapers

Online Communities More Important To Guys

from the don't-make-me-leave-my-WoW-buddies dept

Despite the fact that more women than men are now online, there still seems to be some perception out there that the internet is still a male-dominated world. Perhaps one reason for that is that men value their online connections more. At least that's the results coming from a new study showing that, on average, men tend to feel stronger connections with online communities. Of course, the report doesn't seem to explore why that is. It could potentially have something to do with the fact that early on, the internet really was male-dominated, and the community structures fit better with typical male interactions. It will be interesting to see if this remains the same, or if, over time, there are better forms of community that allow both men and women to feel equally strongly connected to their online communities.

Filed Under: communities, connections, men, women

Is Web 2.0 About Exploitation Or Empowerment?

from the an-academic-look dept

Earlier this year, at the Mesh Conference in Toronto, I had the pleasure of meeting Nancy Baym, a professor of communications at the University of Kansas. She's been doing tremendous research into questions concerning online "fan" communities around musicians. She's just posted her latest paper, with Robert Burnett from Karlstad University in Sweden, examining the question of whether or not Web 2.0 "fan communities" are really about exploitation or empowerment. This is a question we've addressed before, given that web 2.0 critics, such as Nicholas Carr, like to ignore that there are non-monetary benefits in the economy, and thus assume that any activity done for reasons other than money are exploitation.

The paper takes a balanced look at the Swedish independent music scene, which relies heavily on fan communities to act as filters and promoters of the music. The record labels don't focus so much on "selling music" so much as building up attention that can then be monetized in many different ways. Thus, they encourage fans to share and promote their music for them. So, is this use of fans exploitation?

The paper shows that, contrary to the "exploitation" view, the fans often get plenty of value out of the whole process, if not directly in monetary terms. As the paper notes, the concept of "exploitation" suggests a cost to the participant, but if they get more out of participating than they give up, then it hardly seems like exploitation. Instead, it's a reasonable choice in a non-monetary market, where they get more value than they put in. Plus, the paper notes that some of the fan participants eventually do make some money out of their efforts as well. That shouldn't come as much of a surprise. There are plenty of folks who became highly involved in a hobby and are eventually able to turn that into a business.

But the bigger issue for many fans, is simply being able to build relationships with the musicians they love -- and with other fans. To them, that's worth a lot more than money, and it's hard to see how building strong relationships and friendships can be seen as exploitation.

On top of that, the paper notes that the fans also make use of certain strategies to make sure -- implicitly or explicitly -- that they're not being exploited. In other words, whether they realize it or not, they're aware at some level of the possibility of being exploited by the situation, and they make certain choices to protect against that possibility. Overall, a very interesting paper that's worth reading, and I look forward to more research on this topic.

Filed Under: communities, exploitation, music, nancy baym, research, sweden