13 Matching Annotations
  1. Dec 2022
    1. Alas, lawmakers are way behind the curve on this, demanding new "online safety" rules that require firms to break E2E and block third-party de-enshittification tools: https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/online-safety-made-dangerous/ The online free speech debate is stupid because it has all the wrong focuses: Focusing on improving algorithms, not whether you can even get a feed of things you asked to see; Focusing on whether unsolicited messages are delivered, not whether solicited messages reach their readers; Focusing on algorithmic transparency, not whether you can opt out of the behavioral tracking that produces training data for algorithms; Focusing on whether platforms are policing their users well enough, not whether we can leave a platform without losing our important social, professional and personal ties; Focusing on whether the limits on our speech violate the First Amendment, rather than whether they are unfair: https://doctorow.medium.com/yes-its-censorship-2026c9edc0fd

      This list is particularly good.


      Proper regulation of end to end services would encourage the creation of filtering and other tools which would tend to benefit users rather than benefit the rent seeking of the corporations which own the pipes.

  2. May 2022
    1. For example, we know one of the ways to make people care about negative externalities is to make them pay for it; that’s why carbon pricing is one of the most efficient ways of reducing emissions. There’s no reason why we couldn’t enact a data tax of some kind. We can also take a cautionary tale from pricing externalities, because you have to have the will to enforce it. Western Canada is littered with tens of thousands of orphan wells that oil production companies said they would clean up and haven’t, and now the Canadian government is chipping in billions of dollars to do it for them. This means we must build in enforcement mechanisms at the same time that we’re designing principles for data governance, otherwise it’s little more than ethics-washing.

      Building in pre-payments or a tax on data leaks to prevent companies neglecting negative externalities could be an important stick in government regulation.

      While it should apply across the board, it should be particularly onerous for for-profit companies.

  3. Dec 2021
  4. Aug 2021
    1. Francis Fukuyama et al., Middleware for Dominant Digital Platforms: A Technological Solution to a Threat to Democracy, Stanford Cyber Policy Center, 3, https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/cpc-middleware_ff_v2.pdf.
    2. Every year, in my platform-regulation class, I draw a Venn diagram on the board with three interlocking circles: privacy, speech, and competition. Then we identify all the issues that fall at the intersection of two or more circles. Interoperability, including for content-moderation purposes, is always smack in the middle. It touches every circle. This is what makes it hard. We have to solve problems in all those areas to make middleware work. But this is also what makes the concept so promising. If—or when—we do manage to meet this many-sided challenge, we will unlock something powerful.

      Interesting point about the intersection of interoperability. Are there other features that also touch them all?

    3. Francis Fukuyama has called "middleware": content-curation services that could give users more control over the material they see on internet platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.
  5. Feb 2021
  6. Oct 2020
    1. When a dominant firm buys its a nascent challenger, alarm bells are supposed to ring. Yet both American and European regulators found themselves unable to find anything wrong with the takeover.
  7. Jun 2020
  8. Dec 2019
    1. Moving back to a focus on protocols over platforms can solve many of these problems.

      This may also only be the case if large corporations are forced to open up and support those protocols. If my independent website can't interact freely and openly with something like Twitter on a level playing field, then it really does no good.

  9. Jul 2018
    1. When it comes to democracy and human rights, a Jeffersonian internet is clearly a safer choice. With Web 3.0 still in its infancy, the West at least will need to find other ways to rein in the online giants. The obvious alternative is regulation.