Jack Dorsey Explains The Difficult Decision To Ban Donald Trump; Reiterates Support For Turning Twitter Into A Decentralized Protocol

from the good-to-see dept

Last Friday, Twitter made the decision to permanently ban Donald Trump from its platform, which I wrote about at the time, explaining that it's not an easy decision, but neither is it an unreasonable one. On Wednesday, Jack Dorsey put out an interesting Twitter thread in which he discusses some of the difficulty in making such a decision. This is good to see. So much of the content moderation debate often is told in black and white terms, in which many people act as if one answer is "obvious" and any other thing is crazy. And part of the reason for that is many of these decisions are made behind close doors, and no one outside gets to see the debates, or how much the people within the company explore the trade-offs and nuances inherent in one of these decisions.

Jack doesn't go into that much detail, but enough to explain that the company felt that, given the wider context of everything that happened last week, it absolutely made sense to put in place the ban now, even as the company's general stance and philosophy has always pushed back on such an approach. In short, context matters:

Here's his thread in plaintext:

I do not celebrate or feel pride in our having to ban @realDonaldTrump from Twitter, or how we got here. After a clear warning we’d take this action, we made a decision with the best information we had based on threats to physical safety both on and off Twitter. Was this correct?

I believe this was the right decision for Twitter. We faced an extraordinary and untenable circumstance, forcing us to focus all of our actions on public safety. Offline harm as a result of online speech is demonstrably real, and what drives our policy and enforcement above all.

That said, having to ban an account has real and significant ramifications. While there are clear and obvious exceptions, I feel a ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation. And a time for us to reflect on our operations and the environment around us. Having to take these actions fragment the public conversation. They divide us. They limit the potential for clarification, redemption, and learning. And sets a precedent I feel is dangerous: the power an individual or corporation has over a part of the global public conversation.

The check and accountability on this power has always been the fact that a service like Twitter is one small part of the larger public conversation happening across the internet. If folks do not agree with our rules and enforcement, they can simply go to another internet service. This concept was challenged last week when a number of foundational internet tool providers also decided not to host what they found dangerous. I do not believe this was coordinated. More likely: companies came to their own conclusions or were emboldened by the actions of others. This moment in time might call for this dynamic, but over the long term it will be destructive to the noble purpose and ideals of the open internet. A company making a business decision to moderate itself is different from a government removing access, yet can feel much the same.

Yes, we all need to look critically at inconsistencies of our policy and enforcement. Yes, we need to look at how our service might incentivize distraction and harm. Yes, we need more transparency in our moderation operations. All this can’t erode a free and open global internet.

I fear that many will miss the important nuances that Jack is explaining here, but there are a few overlapping important points. The context and the situation dictated that this was the right move for Twitter -- and I think there's clear support for that argument. However, it does raise some questions about how the open internet itself functions. If anything, this tweet-thread reminds me of when Cloudlflare removed the Daily Stormer from its service, and the company's CEO, Matthew Prince highlighted that, while the move was justified for a wide variety of reasons, he felt uncomfortable that he had that kind of power.

At the time, Prince called for a wider discussion on these kinds of issues -- and unfortunately those discussions didn't really happen. And so, we're back in a spot where we need to have them again.

The second part of Jack's thread highlights how Twitter is actually working to remove that power from its own hands. As he announced at the end of 2019, he is exploring a protocol-based approach that would make the Twitter system an open protocol standard, with Twitter itself just one implementation. This was based, in part, on my paper on this topic. Here's what Jack is saying now:

The reason I have so much passion for #Bitcoin is largely because of the model it demonstrates: a foundational internet technology that is not controlled or influenced by any single individual or entity. This is what the internet wants to be, and over time, more of it will be. We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media. Our goal is to be a client of that standard for the public conversation layer of the internet. We call it @bluesky.

This will take time to build. We are in the process of interviewing and hiring folks, looking at both starting a standard from scratch or contributing to something that already exists. No matter the ultimate direction, we will do this work completely through public transparency. I believe the internet and global public conversation is our best and most relevant method of achieving this. I also recognize it does not feel that way today. Everything we learn in this moment will better our effort, and push us to be what we are: one humanity working together.

There had been some concern recently that, since nothing was said about the Bluesky project in 2020, Twitter had abandoned it. That is not at all true. There have been discussions (disclaimer: I've been involved in some of those discussions) about how best to approach it and who would work on it. In the fall, a variety of different proposals were submitted for Twitter to review and choose a direction to head in. I've seen the proposals -- and a few have been mentioned publicly. I've been waiting for Twitter to release all of the proposals publicly to talk about them, which I hope will happen soon.

Still, it's interesting to see how the latest debates may lead to finally having this larger discussion about how the internet works, and how it should be managed. While I'm sure Jack will be getting some criticism (because that's the nature of the internet), I appreciate that his approach to this, like Matthew's at Cloudflare, is to recognize his own discomfort with his own power, and to explore better ways of going about things. I wish I could say the same for all internet CEOs.

Filed Under: content moderation, decentralization, donald trump, jack dorsey, platforms, power, protocols
Companies: twitter

Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter

from the there's-a-point... dept

When I started writing this post, it was about Facebook's decision to suspend Trump's account indefinitely, and at least until Joe Biden is inaugurated in a couple weeks. I had lots to say on that... and then Friday afternoon, Twitter decided to ban Trump's Twitter account permanently. This is a bigger deal, not just because it's permanent, rather than indefinite, but because so much of Trump's identity over the last four years (and before that) is tied up in his Twitter account and followers.

Certainly, all of this has kicked off a whole new storm from across the political spectrum. You have Trump supporters who are furious and (falsely) claiming that this is "censorship" or unprecedented and heavy handed (it is none of those things). Then you have Trump haters who are screaming about how this is all way too late and is trying to close the barn door after the horses have long since bolted. I think neither argument is accurate. Will Oremus has a long (and very interesting!) look over on OneZero about how Facebook supposedly chucked out its own rulebook to come up with an excuse to suspend Trump's account:

Yet Facebook’s “indefinite” ban on Trump marks an overnight reversal of the policy on Trump and other political leaders that the social network has spent the past four years honing, justifying, and defending. The unprecedented move, which lacks a clear basis in any of Facebook’s previously stated policies, highlights for the millionth time that the dominant platforms are quite literally making up the rules of online speech as they go along. As I wrote in 2019, there’s just one golden rule of content moderation that every platform follows: If a policy becomes too controversial, change it.

Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook has allowed Trump to use its platform in a manner “consistent with our own rules” is laughable. The only thing that has been consistent, until now, is Facebook’s determination to contort, hair-split, and reimagine its rules to make sure nothing Trump posted would fall too far outside them. The Washington Post wrote a rather definitive account of the social network’s yearslong Trump-appeasement campaign earlier this year. Among other Trump-friendly measures, the Post noted, “Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers.”

And Twitter is also justifying its decision by saying that the reason was a rules violation:

We assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy, which aims to prevent the glorification of violence that could inspire others to replicate violent acts and determined that they were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

This determination is based on a number of factors, including:

I don't need to post the factors. You can take a look yourself if you want. So, Oremus is mostly correct that they're making the rules up as they go along, but the problem with this framing is that it assumes that there are some magical rules you can put in place and then objectively apply them always. That's never ever been the case. The problem with so much of the content moderation debate is that all sides assume these things. They assume that it's easy to set up rules and easy to enforce them. Neither is true. Radiolab did a great episode a few years ago, detailing the process by which Facebook made and changed its rules. And it highlights some really important things including that almost every case is different, that it's tough to apply rules to every case, and that context is always changing. And that also means the rules must always keep changing.

A few years back, we took a room full of content moderation experts and asked them to make content moderation decisions on eight cases -- none of which I'd argue are anywhere near as difficult as deciding what to do with the President of the United States. And we couldn't get these experts to agree on anything. On every case, we had at least one person choose each of the four options we gave them, and to defend that position. The platforms have rules because it gives them a framework to think about things, and those rules are useful in identifying both principles for moderation and some bright lines.

But every case is different.

And no matter what you think of Trump, his case was different.

The regular rules could never apply to Trump because Trump is not a regular person. And, no, not even comparisons to foreign leaders are apt, because as silly as American exceptionalism is, the United States is still different than nearly every other country in the world. And, it's not just the position he's in (for the next few days anyway), but also Trump's willingness to use his account to make pronouncements unlike pretty much any other world leader (or at least, world leader of consequence).

Trump is, perhaps, the perfect example of why demanding clear rules on social media and how they moderate is stupid.

As for the question of why now? Well, clearly, the context has changed. The context is that Trump inspired a mob of goons to invade the Capitol building this week, and there remain legitimate threats that his cultish followers will continue to do significant damage. Certainly some people have insisted that this kind of violence was always a risk -- and it was. But it had not actually erupted to this level in this fashion. Again, we're talking about context. There's always more context.

And given that the situations are always edge cases, that the context always matters, and that things are always shifting, you can totally see why it's a reasonable decision to ban Trump from their platforms right now, based on everything else going on, and the likelihood that he might inspire more violence. I think it's worth reading Ben Thompson's analysis as well. He's long explained the risks associated with banning Trump from these platforms, and suggested why they should not have in the past. But the thing that changed for him, beyond even just the threat to democracy, is the threat to the rights of both individuals and companies to make their own decisions on these things:

Remember my highest priority, even beyond respect for democracy, is the inviolability of liberalism, because it is the foundation of said democracy. That includes the right for private individuals and companies to think and act for themselves, particularly when they believe they have a moral responsibility to do so, and the belief that no one else will. Yes, respecting democracy is a reason to not act over policy disagreements, no matter how horrible those policies may be, but preserving democracy is, by definition, even higher on the priority stack.

Turn off Trump’s account.

But here's the more important point -- especially directed at the people who will falsely claim that this is somehow censorship: President Trump is not being censored. He is not being limited. At any moment of any day (certainly for the next two weeks, and likely beyond) he can walk out of his office and have every major TV news channel (and every internet streaming platform) broadcast whatever he wants to say, and people will see it.

And to those who think that Twitter should have done this earlier, or that it would have made a difference, recognize that your concern is not so much with Twitter, but with Trump himself. Remember that while Trump might not be able to send a tweet right now, he still (literally) has the power to launch nuclear missiles at Twitter's headquarters. And, really, that's the problem. Trump is obviously too toxic for Twitter. But he's also too toxic for the White House. And the real complaint shouldn't be about Twitter or Facebook acting too late, but about Congress failing to do their job and remove the mad man from power.

Filed Under: adaptability, censorship, consequences, content moderation, donald trump, free speech, platforms, rules, section 230, social media
Companies: facebook, twitter

Tillis Release Details Of His Felony Streaming Bill; A Weird Gift To Hollywood At The Expense Of Taxpayers

from the and-why-through-omnibus dept

Earlier today, we wrote about reports detailing the latest attempt to push through a bill to make streaming copyright-covered works online a possible felony, this time being pushed by Senator Thom Tillis, who wanted to attach it to the federal spending omnibus bill. As we noted, Tillis was pushing back on some of the criticism, saying that the bill is very narrowly tailored and wouldn't be used to criminalize random people. Of course, the response to that is twofold: (1) if this is the case, why haven't you released the text and (2) why are you shoving it onto a must-pass funding bill without any of the normal debate and discussion?

This afternoon Tillis dealt with the first part of this by finally releasing the text of the bill. And he's somewhat correct in noting that the bill is narrowly tailored. That doesn't make it good or necessary. The key bit is this:

PROHIBITED ACT.—It shall be unlawful to willfully, and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain, offer or provide to the public a digital transmission service that

‘‘(1) is primarily designed or provided for the purpose of publicly performing works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law;

‘‘(2) has no commercially significant purpose or use other than to publicly perform works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law; or

‘‘(3) is intentionally marketed by or at the direction of that person to promote its use in publicly performing works protected under title 17 by means of a digital transmission without the authority of the copyright owner or the law.

So, the argument is that the "narrow" tailoring here is such that it only applies to websites, not users, if that site is "primarily" engaged in streaming unlicensed copyright-covered works, has no significant purpose other than that, and intentionally markets itself as such.

And, to Tillis' credit, this is much more narrowly tailored than previous such bills. It still doesn't explain why the text is only just being released now or (more importantly) why this has to be added to a must-pass Christmas Tree government funding bill.

To some extent, the thinking behind this bill is that it's focused on a very specific set of circumstances. There have been websites out there that stream content they host, and those already faced felony charges for the hosting -- but this seems to extend that to sites that stream the content that is hosted elsewhere. Of course, there is a much bigger question of why is this a criminal issue in the first place? It is yet another example of Hollywood trying to pass off what should be a civil issue, where the movie studios and record labels have every right and ability to sue these companies in court, and turn them into an issue that the US taxpayer now has to deal with? It's basically a giant subsidy to Hollywood, taking a private dispute and putting it on the public dime.

As Public Knowledge says in its response to the bill's release, "we do not see the need for further criminal penalties for copyright infringement." Indeed.

The end result is that this bill is not as horrific as past felony streaming bills, and is, in fact, narrowly tailored. However, that does not change the fact that moving copyright issues away from civil disputes to be handled by copyright holders, to the federal government, is something that we should not support. Indeed, it should be seen as somewhat odd that a Trump-supporting Republican, who claims to be for keeping government out of business, is directly subsidizing Hollywood by having the federal government and US taxpayers take over their own civil legal dispute by turning them into criminal issues.

And, more importantly, none of this explains why the bill should be released at the last moment, and then dumped into the must-pass federal spending bill. It's a bad idea. If Tillis really thinks this bill is good and necessary, he should have to defend it as such through the regular process bills go through.

Filed Under: copyright, criminal copyright, felony streaming, platforms, streaming, thom tillis

Microsoft: Bethesda Games Will Be 'First, Best' On Xbox, PC

from the fragmentation dept

Several weeks back, we discussed how Microsoft and its newly acquired property, Bethesda Softworks, were making seemingly conflicting statements on what the purchase of the studio meant for beloved franchises like Fallout and Elder Scrolls, among others. Concerns popped up immediately after the acquisition, with people wondering whether the next Fallout game would be siloed to the Xbox and/or PC, as opposed to showing up on other consoles, such as Sony's PlayStation. Xbox's Phil Spencer kicked the concern into overdrive by noting that he thought Microsoft could recoup its purchase price of Bethesda even if the studio's games weren't sold for the PlayStation. Todd Howard of Bethesda, however, said the studio is committed to making its games available across platforms, while also acknowledging such details with Microsoft hadn't been ironed out.

And so the public was left wondering. Well, now Microsoft has once again commented publicly, this time stating that it doesn't plan to restrict Bethesda games from other consoles, but would instead look to make those games "first and best" on the Xbox and PC.

Speaking at the Jeffries Interactive Entertainment Virtual Conference last Friday (as transcribed by Seeking Alpha), Stuart said directly that "in the long run... we don't have intentions of just pulling all of Bethesda content out of Sony or Nintendo or otherwise. But what we want is we want that content, in the long run, to be either first or better or best or pick your differentiated experience, on our platforms."

"That's not a point about being exclusive," Stuart continued. "That's not a point about... adjusting timing or content or road map. But if you think about something like Game Pass, if it shows up best in Game Pass, that's what we want to see, and we want to drive our Game Pass subscriber base through that Bethesda pipeline."

This, frankly, clarifies nothing. Stating that perhaps games will be "first" on Microsoft's platforms and then stating that it has nothing to do with timing of the release on other platforms is contradictory. If it's "first" on one platform, it must therefore be at least "second" on others. Likewise, stating you want a game to be "best" on Microsoft platforms and then stating it has nothing to do with content is, again, contradictory. If not the content, what could possibly make a game better on one platform than the other.

It's unclear why Microsoft is remaining so opaque about all of this, but it sure sounds like some version of either EPIC's timed exclusives or Sony's exclusive content for games. Both are controversial in their own rights, and likely not great for the gaming ecosystem as a whole, but at least both companies play it straight with their customers.

In this case, we all just have to wait and see how high a fence Microsoft does or does not want to put around these beloved game franchises.

Filed Under: compatibility, elder scrolls, fallout, pcs, platforms, ps5, video games, xbox
Companies: bethesda, microsoft

Knight Foundation Grant To Copia To Research Content Moderation, Governance, Rules & Norms For Internet Infrastructure

from the excited-to-dig-in dept

So many of the discussions around content moderation have focused on the so-called "edge-providers" (the companies that are more user-facing). We all know the stories about content moderation dealing with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, etc. But for a while now we've been concerned about how the debate will play out regarding content moderation at the infrastructure layers -- that is the behind-the-scenes providers that people don't always even know exist. This includes hosting companies, DNS providers, domain registrars, CDNs, broadband providers and many, many more.

So we're (in the form of our Copia Institute think tank) are excited to be a part of a new grant to research this issue, with a specific focus on how these infrastructure content moderation issues may impact competition, privacy, and liability. We're planning to do some (virtual, for the time being!) gatherings, and putting together some research about these issues as well.

This is the first time we've worked with the Knight Foundation, and we're excited that they were willing to step up and support such important work.

Filed Under: content moderation, governance, grant, infrastructure, internet infrastructure, platforms, protocols, research
Companies: copia institute, knight foundation

The Decentralized Web Could Help Preserve The Internet's Data For 1,000 Years. Here's Why We Need IPFS To Build It.

from the protocols-not-platforms dept

The internet economy runs on data. As of 2019, there were over 4.13 billion internet users generating more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. By the end of 2020, there will be 40 times more bytes of data than there are stars to observe in space. And all of this data is powering a digital revolution, with the data-driven internet economy already accounting for 6.9% of U.S. GDP in 2017. The internet data ecosystem supports a bustling economy ripe with opportunity for growth, innovation, and profit.

There’s just one problem: While user-generated data is the web’s most valuable asset, internet users themselves have almost no control over it. Data storage, data ownership, and data use are all highly centralized under the control of a few dominant corporate entities on the web, like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. And all that data centralization comes at an expensive cost to the ordinary internet user. Today’s internet ecosystem, while highly profitable for a few corporations, creates incentives for major platforms to exercise content censorship over end-users who have nowhere else to go. It is also incompatible with data privacy, insecure against cybercrime and extremely fragile.

The web’s fragility in particular presents a big problem for the long-term sustainability of the web: we’re creating datasets that will be important for humanity 1000 years from now, but we aren’t safeguarding that data in a way that is future-proof. Link rot plagues the web today, with one study finding that over 98% of web links decay within 20 years. We are exiting the plastic era, and entering the data era, but at this rate our data won’t outlast our disposable straws.

To build a stronger, more resilient and more private internet, we need to decentralize the web by putting users back in control of their data. The web that we deserve isn’t the centralized web of today, but the decentralized web of tomorrow. And the decentralized web of tomorrow will need to last the next 1,000 years, or more.

Our team has been working for several years to make this vision of a decentralized web a reality by changing the way that apps, developers, and ordinary internet users make and share data. We couldn’t be doing this today without the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)—a crucial tool in our toolbox that’s helping us tear down the major technological hurdles to building a decentralized web. To see why, we need to understand both the factors driving centralization on the web today, and how IPFS changes the game.

In fact, I want to make a bold prediction: in the next one to two years, we’re going to see every major web-browser shipping with an IPFS peer, by default. This has already started with the recent announcement that Opera for Android will now support IPFS out of the box. This type of deep integration is going to catalyze a whole range of new user and developer experiences in both mobile and desktop browsers. Perhaps more importantly, it is going to help us all safeguard our data for future net-izens.

Here’s how:

With the way the web works now, if I want to access a piece of data, I have to go to a specific server location. Content on the internet today is indexed and browsed based on where it is. Obviously, this method of distributing data puts a lot of power into the hands of whoever owns the location where data is stored, just as it takes power out of the hands of whoever generates data. Major companies like Google and Amazon became as big as they are by assuming the role of trusted data intermediaries, routing all our internet traffic to and through their own central servers where our data is stored.

Yet, however much we may not like “big data” collecting and controlling the internet’s information, the current internet ecosystem incentivizes this kind of centralization. We may want a freer, more private and more democratic internet, but as long as we continue to build our data economy around trusted third-party intermediaries who assume all the responsibilities of data storage and maintenance, we simply can’t escape the gravitational pull of centralization. Like it or not, our current internet incentives rely on proprietary platforms that disempower ordinary end users. And as Mike Masnick has argued in his essay "Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech", if we want to fix the problems with this web model, we’ll have to rebuild the internet from the protocol layer up.

That’s where IPFS comes in.

IPFS uses “content-addressing,” an alternative way of indexing and browsing data that is based, not on where that data is, but on what it is. On a content-addressable network, I don’t have to ask a central server for data. Instead, the distributed network of users itself can answer my data requests by providing precisely the piece of data requested, with no need to reference any specific storage location. Through IPFS, we can cut out the data intermediaries and establish a data sharing network where information can be owned by anyone and everyone.

This kind of distributed data economy undermines the big data business model by reinventing the incentive structures of web and app development. IPFS makes decentralization workable, scalable and profitable by putting power in the hands of end users instead of platforms. Widespread adoption of IPFS would represent the major upgrade to the web that we need to protect free speech, resist surveillance and network failure, promote innovation, and empower the ordinary internet user.

Of course, the decentralized web still needs a lot of work before it is as user-friendly and accessible as the centralized web of today. But already we’re seeing exciting use cases for technology built on IPFS.

To get us to this exciting future faster, Textile makes it easier for developers to utilize IPFS to its full potential. Some of our partners are harnessing the data permanence that IPFS enables to build immutable digital archives that could withstand server failure and web decay. Others are using our products (e.g., Buckets) to deploy amazing websites, limiting their reliance on centralized servers and allowing them to store data more efficiently.

Textile has been building on IPFS for over three years, and the future of our collaboration on the decentralized web is bright. To escape the big data economy, we need the decentralized web. The improvements brought by IPFS, release after release, will help make the decentralized web a reality by making it easier to onboard new developers and users. As IPFS continues to get more efficient and resilient, its contribution to empowering the free and open web we all deserve will only grow. I can’t wait for the exponential growth we’ll see as this technology continues to become more and more ubiquitous across all our devices and platforms.

Carson Farmer is a researcher and developer with Textile.io. Twitter: @carsonfarmer

Filed Under: archiving, decentralized web, ipfs, platforms, preserving data, protocols

Will Wall Street Get In The Way Of Jack Dorsey's Lofty Plans To Turn Twitter Into A Protocol?

from the that-would-suck dept

A year ago, I was at a round table discussion, where someone was doing one of the standard rants we've all heard, about how big internet companies were evil because they were focused on profits over the health of their user base, etc. I pointed out that while this narrative had taken hold among many people outside of these internet companies, it didn't seem to reflect what I was hearing from those within those companies -- especially as they were investing heavily in "trust & safety" teams, including both hiring people and building technology, that would provide better overall experiences on the platform. Instead, I suggested, their complaint seemed to be more with Wall Street investors, and the short term profits that it demanded from many public companies. There are the Jeff Bezos/Amazon exceptions -- where he basically told Wall Street to go put their head in a bucket for many years while he re-invested in the business as they demanded profits -- but for the most part, public companies are put on a short leash, not so much by management expectations, but the demands of investors.

I'm thinking about that a lot again, following the news of the proxy fight over Twitter's management that was raised just recently. At the beginning of the month, it was revealed that Paul Singer's massive hedge fund Elliott Management had taken a large stake in Twitter, and wanted major changes, including getting rid of founder/CEO Jack Dorsey. A few days later, it was revealed that a deal was struck between Twitter and Elliott Management to keep Dorsey in charge... for now. However, it seems that the situations is fairly tenuous. Elliott Management now has a board seat, and a promise of some very tricky "growth" targets (especially tricky in the face of who knows what's coming with the economy during a pandemic).

The details of those metrics makes it seem clear that Elliott Management is forcing Twitter down a specific path -- one that is likely to make the user experience for Twitter users much, much worse:

As part of the deal, Twitter has committed to reach certain growth and revenue goals. It promises to grow its average number of daily users who can see ads by 20 percent or more in 2020. This is not impossible; in 2019, Twitter nosed past that threshold. But it may be tougher this year, what with a pandemic and maybe a recession. Twitter also vows to “accelerate revenue growth on a year-over-year basis and gain share in the digital advertising market.” (This will be tied to specific numbers as yet undetermined.) This bigger share would most likely have to come at the expense of Google or Facebook, which aren’t exactly pushovers. If Jack doesn’t perform, the committee won’t be happy.

This is crazy on multiple levels -- and seems likely to harm Twitter's long term objectives in a demand to focus solely on the advertising model to make it work. That's going to piss off users, and potentially drive down usage, just to make these Wall Street short termers happy.

My even bigger fear, however, is that this will make it nearly impossible for Dorsey and Twitter to follow through on the company's stated belief in moving to an open protocol, rather than remaining a proprietary platform. Moving to a protocol, while potentially opening up new revenue streams, would likely cause at least a short term problem for Twitter's traditional ad revenue business. And given the short term nature of the investor's mindset, they seem unlikely to allow the company to really push forward with such a radical change. And, of course, if Dorsey is eventually pushed out by the board, whoever takes over may not care at all about the open internet and a protocols-based approach. I think that would doom Twitter over the long run, but Wall St. doesn't much seem to care about that.

Hopefully this isn't how things play out, but it is concerning. It's also a reminder that whenever people insist that it's the folks at the internet companies driving for profit over all else, it might actually be Wall Street and the broken structure of our public markets, that basically require a short-term, profit-maximization model over a long-term sustainable model.

Filed Under: advertising, jack dorsey, paul singer, platforms, profits, protocols, short term, wall street
Companies: elliott management, twitter

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.

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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