<https://areomagazine.com/2019/07/31/towards-a-free-and-open-internet/>
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Were these interlocking visions to come to fruition, we could revisit the fantasy described above. Several clearly desirable features immediately present themselves. For example, the issue of gatekeepers who exist for technical reasons assigning themselves political authority would evaporate. Were Facebook or Twitter run on a distributed network of servers as mere protocols for data exchange, porting the so-called social graph would be a trivial endeavour. The data indicating the personal connections around which your social media experience is built would exist on your server, and on each of your connections’ servers, and would be marked as such in order to be called by the Facebook or Twitter protocol in the first place. A challenger social network would simply tap into the same data, given your permission.
This might seem terribly abstract, but in fact it is exactly how the likes of Telegram and Signal work today with respect to your phone number. This in turn invites a comparison to a concept called Mobile Number Portability (MNP). This means in essence that you have a legal right to retain your mobile phone number when you switch carriers, and has been in force in most of Europe since the early 2000s, in Australia since 2001, the US since 2003, and most of Asia since the late 2000s, and more recently in a handful of other jurisdictions. What is interesting about MNP is that it is technically extremely complex and costly to implement, and furthermore is clearly not at all in the interests of carriers. Without this legal mandate, carriers would have profound network effects allowing them to either build applications such as Telegram and Signal to further lock users in, or rent-seek from those who do. And yet the discourse in this arena could hardly be more different to that surrounding Facebook and Twitter (probably because the Internet is not involved). There is no, why don’t competitors just build a competing service?, or, these companies put in the development and operational costs, so why shouldn’t they have the chance to profit?. There is only, this is obviously fair to consumers, so do it. End of discussion.
To the extent that politicians or regulators feel the need or pressure to do something about big tech, this is probably the only sensible course of action. Arbitrarily large fines from the FTC, seemingly celebrated by Wall Street, will likely seem like an unhelpful quick fix before too long. Hard cases make bad law. We could and probably should mandate portability of personal data under the auspices of providing fairness to consumers and encouraging competition among web services. But it isn’t clear to me that any other form of proposed regulation would treat the disease, rather than everybody’s personal favourite symptoms. As seems to have happened with GDPR, a poorly conceived regulatory sweep will probably have the unintended consequences of further entrenching the monopolists. My preference would be to obviate regulation altogether by catalysing consumer self-sovereignty. Rearchitecting the Internet is a rather utopian goal, but the open source ethos is alive and well at practically every layer of development, up to and including upstart competing applications.
So here’s my plea: stop using big tech and venture into the wild.
As with all things online, this will involve a trade-off. I will not pretend that open source alternative applications such as Gab, Minds, DuckDuckGo, Telegram and Brave are yet as slick, powerful or robust as the Silicon Valley titans they seek to ultimately supplant. Nor is the underlying infrastructure of Urbit, ActivityPub or Bitcoin. The biggest problem of all is really a vicious circle: Facebook and Google have profound network effects, and open source alternatives, so far, do not. But network effects work in reverse too. We tend not to notice because this isn’t as sexy. If a critical mass of users switches away from Google or Facebook, their collapse will be surprisingly quick. This is a very dramatic potential outcome, and I suspect it is more likely that, at a certain rate of user emigration, these companies, and others, will adapt their policies to be more free and open, so as to better compete in this new environment.
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