To Regulate Facebook and Google, Turn Users Into Customers

First published in Techonomy, 2/26/19 -- and more timely than ever...

There is a growing consensus that we need to regulate Facebook, Google, and other large internet platforms that harm the public in large part because they are driven by targeted advertising.  The seductive idea that we can enjoy free internet services — if we just view ads and turn over our data — has been recognized to be “the original sin” of the internet.  These companies favor the interests of the advertisers they profit from more than the interests of their billions of users.  They are powerful tools for mass-customized mind-control. Selling their capabilities to the highest bidder threatens not just consumer welfare, but society and democracy.

There is a robust debate emerging about how these companies should be regulated. Many argue for controls on data use and objectionable content on these platforms.  But poorly targeted regulation risks many adverse side-effects – for example abridging legitimate speech, and further entrenching these dominant platforms and impeding innovation by making it too costly for others to compete.

But I believe we need to treat the disease, not just play whack-a-mole with the symptoms. It’s the business model, stupid! It is widely recognized that the root cause of the problem is the extractive, ad-funded, business model that motivates manipulation and surveillance.  The answer is to require these companies to shift to revenue streams that come from their users.  Of course, shifting cold-turkey to a predominantly user-revenue-based model is hard.  But in reality, we have a simple, market-driven, regulatory method that has already proven its success in addressing a similarly challenging problem – forcing automakers to increase the fuel efficiency of the cars they make. Government has for years required staged multi-year increases in Corporate Average Fuel Efficiency. A similar strategy can be applied here.

This market-driven strategy does not mandate how to fix things. It instead mandates a measurable limit on the systems that have been shown to cause harm.  Each service provider can determine on their own how best to achieve that.  Require that X% of the revenue of any consumer data service come from its users rather than advertisers.  Government can monitor their progress, and create a timetable for steadily ratcheting up the percentage.  (This might apply only above some amount of revenues, to limit constraints on small, innovative competitors.)

It is often said of our internet platforms that “if you are not the customer, you are the product.”  This concept may oversimplify, but it is deeply powerful.  With or without detailed regulations on privacy and data use, we need to shift platform incentives by making the user become the customer, increasingly over time.

Realigning incentives for ads and data.  Advertising can provide value to users – if it is targeted and executed in a way that is non-intrusive, relevant, and useful.  The best way to make advertising less extractive of user value is by quantifying a “reverse meter” that gives users credit for their attention and data.  Some services already offer users the option to pay in order to avoid or reduce ads (Spotify is one example).  That makes the user the customer. Both advertisers and the platforms benefit by managing user attention to maximize, rather than optimize for exploitive “engagement.”

What if the mandated user revenue level is not met?  Government could tax away enough ad revenue to meet the target percentage.  That would provide a powerful incentive to address the problem.  In addition, that taxed excess ad revenue could fund mechanisms for oversight and transparency, for developing better solutions, and for remediating disinformation.

Can the platforms really shift to user revenue?  Zuckerberg has been a skeptic, but none of the big platforms has tried seriously.  When the platforms realize they must make this change, they will figure out how, even if it trims their exorbitant margins.

Users increasingly recognize that they must pay for digital services.  A system of reverse metering of ads and data use would be a powerful start.  Existing efforts that hint at the ultimate potential of better models include including crowdfunding, membership models, and cooperatives. Other emerging variations promise to be adaptive to large populations of users with diverse value perceptions and abilities to pay.

A growing focus on customer value would move us back towards leveraging a proven great strength of humanity — the deeply cooperative behavior of traditional markets.

A simple mandate requiring internet platforms to generate a growing percentage of revenue from users will not cure all ills. But it is the simplest way to drive a fundamental shift toward better corporate behavior.

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Coda, 7/24/19:

Since the original publication of this article, this issue has become even more timely, as the FTC and Justice Department begin deep investigation into the Internet giants. 

• There is growing consensus that there is a fundamental problem with the ad- and data-based business model. 
• There is also growing consensus that we must move beyond the narrow theory of antitrust that says there can be no "harm" in a free service that does not raise direct costs to consumers (but does raise indirect costs to them and limits competition). 
• But the targeted strategies for forcing a fundamental shift in business models outlined here are still not widely known or considered. 

For more information see my Open Letter to Influencers Concerned About Facebook and Other Platforms. 

• It primarily focuses on these business model issues and regulatory strategies (including the auto emissions model described here), and how FairPay offers an innovative strategy that has gained recognition for how it can generate user revenue in equitable ways that do not prevent a service like Facebook or Google from being affordable by all, even those with limited ability to pay.
• It also links to a body of work "On the deeper issues of social media and digital democracy." That includes Google-like algorithms for getting smarter about the wisdom of crowds, and structural strategies for regulation based on the specific architecture of the platforms and how power should be modularized (much as smart modularization was applied to regulating the Bell System and enabling the decades of robust innovation we now enjoy.)

A Regulatory Framework for the Internet (with Thanks to Ben Thompson)

Summarizing Ben Thompson of Stratechery, plus my own targeted proposals

"A Regulatory Framework for the Internet," Ben Thompson's masterly framework, should be required reading for all regulators, as well as anyone concerned about tech and society. (Stratechery is one of the best tech newsletters, well worth the subscription price, but this article is freely accessible.)

I hope you will read Ben's full article, but here are some points that I find especially important, followed by the suggestions I posted on his forum (which is not publicly accessible).

Part I -- Highlights from Ben's Framework (emphasis added)

Opening with the UK government White Paper calling for increased regulation of tech companies, Ben quotes MIT Tech Review about the alarm it raised among privacy campaigners, who "fear that the way it is implemented could easily lead to censorship for users of social networks rather than curbing the excesses of the networks themselves."

Ben identifies three clear questions that make regulation problematic:

First, what content should be regulated, if any, and by whom?
Second, what is a viable way to monitor the content generated on these platforms?
Third, how can privacy, competition, and free expression be preserved?

Exploring the viral spread of the Christchurch hate crime video, he gets to a key issue:

What is critical to note, though, is that it is not a direct leap from “pre-Internet” to the Internet as we experience it today. The terrorist in Christchurch didn’t set up a server to livestream video from his phone; rather, he used Facebook’s built-in functionality. And, when it came to the video’s spread, the culprit was not email or message boards, but social media generally. To put it another way, to have spread that video on the Internet would be possible but difficult; to spread it on social media was trivial.

The core issue is business models: to set up a live video streaming server is somewhat challenging, particularly if you are not technically inclined, and it costs money. More expensive still are the bandwidth costs of actually reaching a significant number of people. Large social media sites like Facebook or YouTube, though, are happy to bear those costs in service of a larger goal: building their advertising businesses.

Expanding on business models, he describes the ad-based platforms as "Super Aggregators:"

The key differentiator of Super Aggregators is that they have three-sided markets: users, content providers (which may include users!), and advertisers. Both content providers and advertisers want the user’s attention, and the latter are willing to pay for it. This leads to a beautiful business model from the perspective of a Super Aggregator:

Content providers provide content for free, facilitated by the Super Aggregator
Users view that content, and provide their own content, facilitated by the Super Aggregator
Advertisers can reach the exact users they want, paying the Super Aggregator 

...Moreover, this arrangement allows Super Aggregators to be relatively unconcerned with what exactly flows across their network: advertisers simply want eyeballs, and the revenue from serving them pays for the infrastructure to not only accommodate users but also give content suppliers the tools to provide whatever sort of content those users may want.

...while they would surely like to avoid PR black-eyes, what they like even more is the limitless supply of attention and content that comes from making it easier for anyone anywhere to upload and view content of any type.

...Note how much different this is than a traditional customer-supplier relationship, even one mediated by a market-maker... When users pay they have power; when users and those who pay are distinct, as is the case with these advertising-supported Super Aggregators, the power of persuasion — that is, the power of the market — is absent.

He then distinguishes the three types of "free" relevant to the Internet, and how they differ:

“Free as in speech” means the freedom or right to do something
“Free as in beer” means that you get something for free without any additional responsibility
“Free as in puppy” means that you get something for free, but the longterm costs are substantial

...The question that should be asked, though, is if preserving “free as in speech” should also mean preserving “free as in beer.”

Platforms that are paid for by their users are "regulated" by the operation of market forces, but those that are ad-supported are not, and so need external regulation.

Ben concludes that:

...platform providers that primarily monetize through advertising should be in their own category: as I noted above, because these platform providers separate monetization from content supply and consumption, there is no price or payment mechanism to incentivize them to be concerned with problematic content; in fact, the incentives of an advertising business drive them to focus on engagement, i.e. giving users what they want, no matter how noxious.

 This distinct categorization is critical to developing regulation that actually addresses problems without adverse side effects

...from a theoretical perspective, the appropriate place for regulation is where there is market failure; constraining the application to that failure is what is so difficult.

That leads to Ben's figure that brings these ideas together, and delineates critical distinctions:

I agree completely, and build on that with my two proposals for highly targeted regulation...

Part II -- My proposals, as commented on in the Statechery Forum 
(including some minor edits and portions that were abridged to meet character limits):

Elegant model, beautifully explained! Should be required reading for all regulators.

FIRST:  Fix the business model! I suggest taking this model farther, and mandating that the "free beer" ad-based model be ratcheted away once a service reaches some critical level of scale. That would solve the problem -- and address your concerns about competition.

Why don't we regulate to fix the root cause? The root cause of Facebook's abuse of trust is its business model, and until we change that, its motivations will always be opposed to consumer and public trust.

Here is a simple way to force change, without over-engineering the details of the remedy. Requiring a growing percentage of revenue from users is the simplest way to drive a fundamental shift toward better corporate behavior. Others have suggested paying for data, and I suggest this is most readily done in the form of credits against a user service fee. Mandating that a target level of revenue (above a certain level) come from users could drive Facebook to offer such data credits, as a way to meet their user revenue target (even if most users pay nothing beyond that credit). We will not motivate trust until the user becomes the customer, and not the product.

There is a regulatory method that has already proven its success with a similarly challenging problem – forcing automakers to increase the fuel efficiency of the cars they make. The US government has for years mandated staged multi-year increases in Average Fuel Efficiency. This does not mandate how to fix things. It mandates a limit on the systems that have been shown to cause harm. Facebook and YouTube can determine how best to achieve that. Require that X% of the revenue come from users rather than advertisers. Government can monitor progress, with a timetable for ratcheting up the percentage. (This should apply only above some amount of revenues, to facilitate competition.)

With that motivation, Facebook and YouTube can be driven to shift from advertising revenue to customer revenue. That may seem difficult, but only for lack of trying. Credits for attention and data are a just a start. If we move in that direction, we can be less dependent on other, more problematic, kinds of regulation.

This regulatory strategy is outlined in To Regulate Facebook and Google, Turn Users Into Customers (in Techonomy). More on why that is important in Reverse the Biz Model! -- Undo the Faustian Bargain for Ads and Data. (And some suggestions on more effective ways to obtain user revenue:  Information Wants to be Free; Consumers May Want to Pay, (also in Techonomy.)

SECOND: Downrank dissemination, don't censor speech! Your points about limiting user expression, and that the real issue is harmful spreading on social media, are also vitally important.

I say the real issue is:

1.  Not: rules for what can and cannot be said – speech is a protected right
2.  But rather: rules for what statements are seen by who – distribution (how feeds are filtered and presented) is not a protected right.

The value of a social media service should be to disseminate the good, not the bad. (That is why we talk about “filter bubbles” – failures of value-based filtering.)

I suggest Facebook and YouTube should have little role in deciding what can be said (other than to enforce government standards of free speech and clearly prohibited speech to whatever extent practical).  What matters is who that speech is distributed to, and the network has full control of that.  Strong downranking is a sensible and practical alternative to removal -- far more effective and nuanced, and far less problematic.

I have written about new ways to use PageRank-like algorithms to determine what to downrank or uprank – “rate the raters and weight the ratings.”

• Facebook can have a fairly free hand in downranking objectionable speech
• They can apply community standards to what they promote -- to any number of communities, each with varying standards.
• They could also enable open filtering, so users/communities can chose someone else’s algorithm (or set their preferences in any algorithm). 
• With smart filtering, the spread of harmful speech can be throttled before it does much harm.
• The “augmented wisdom of the crowd” can do that very effectively, on Internet scale, in real time.
• No pre-emptive, exclusionary, censorship technique is as effective at scale -- nor as protective of free speech rights or community standards.

That approach is addressed at some length in these posts (where “fake news” is meant to include anything objectionable to some community):

• The Augmented Wisdom of Crowds: Rate the Raters and Weight the Ratings
• A Cognitive Immune System for Social Media -- Developing Systemic Resistance to Fake News

…and some further discussion on that:

• Architecting Our Platforms to Better Serve Us -- Augmenting and Modularizing the Algorithm
• The Tao of Fake News
• In the War on Fake News, All of Us are Soldiers, Already!)

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More of my thinking on these issues is summarized in this Open Letter to Influencers Concerned About Facebook and Other Platforms

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See the Selected Items tab for more on this theme.

Architecting Our Platforms to Better Serve Us -- Augmenting and Modularizing the Algorithm

We dreamed that our Internet platforms would serve us miraculously, but now see that they have taken a wrong turn in many serious respects. That realization has reached a crescendo in the press and in Congress with regard to Facebook and Google's advertising-driven services, but it reaches far more deeply.

"Titans on Trial: Do internet giants have too much power? Should governments intervene?" -- I had the honor last night of attending this stimulating mock trial, with author Ken Auletta as judge and FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny and Rob Atkinson, President of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) as opposing advocates (hosted by Genesys Partners). My interpretation of the the jury verdict (voted by all of the attendees, who were mostly investors or entrepreneurs) was: yes, most agree that regulation is needed, but it must be nuanced and smartly done, not heavy handed. Just how to do that will be a challenge, but it is a challenge that we must urgently consider.

I have been outlining views on this that go in some novel directions, but are generally consistent with the views of many other observers. This post takes a broad view of those suggestions, drawing from several earlier posts.

One of the issues touched on below is a core business model issue -- the idea that the ad-model of "free" services in exchange for attention to ads is "the original sin of the Internet." It has made users of Facebook and Google (and many others) "the product, not the customer," in a way that distorts incentives and fails to serve the user interest and the public interest. As the Facebook fiasco makes clear, these business model incentives can drive these platforms to provide just enough value to "engage" us to give up our data and attend to the advertiser's messages and manipulation and even to foster dopamine-driven addiction, but not necessarily to offer consumer value (services and data protection) that truly serves our interests.

That issue is specifically addressed in a series of posts in my other blog that focuses on a novel approach to business models (and regulation that centers on that), and those posts remain the most focused presentations on those particular issues:

• Who Should Pay the Piper for Facebook? (& the rest) -- the core solution I propose
• Privacy AND Innovation ...NOT Oligopoly -- A Market Solution to a Market Problem -- a simple regulatory approach to change incentives without overreach.

This rest of this post adapts a broader outline of ideas previously embedded in a book review (on Neal Ferguson's "The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook," a historical review of power in the competing forms of networks and hierarchies). Here I abridge and update that post to concentrate on on our digital platforms. (Some complementary points on the need for new thinking on regulation -- and the need for greater tech literacy and nuance -- are in a recent HBR article, "The U.S. Needs a New Paradigm for Data Governance.")

Rethinking our networks -- and the algorithms that make all the difference

Drawing on my long career as a systems analyst/engineer/designer, manager, entrepreneur, inventor, and investor (including early days in the Bell System when it was a regulated monopoly providing "universal service"), I have recently come to share the fear of many that we are going off the rails.

But in spite of the frenzy, it seems we are still failing to refocus on better ways to design, manage, use, and govern our networks -- to better balance the best of hierarchy and openness. Few who understand technology and policy are yet focused on the opportunities that I see as reachable, and now urgently needed.

New levels of man-machine augmentation and new levels of decentralizing and modularizing intelligence can make these network smarter and more continuously adaptable to our wishes, while maintaining sensible and flexible levels of control -- and with the innovative efficiency of an open market.   We can build on distributed intelligence in our networks to find more nuanced ways to balance openness and stability (without relying on unchecked levels of machine intelligence). Think of it as a new kind of systems architecture for modular engineering of rules that blends top-down stability with bottom-up emergence, to apply checks and balances that work much like our representative democracy. This is a still-formative development of ideas that I have written about for years, and plan to continue into the future.

First some context. The crucial differences among all kinds of networks (including hierarchies) are in the rules (algorithms, code, policies) that determine which nodes connect, and with what powers. We now have the power to create a new synthesis. Modern computer-based networks enable our algorithms to be far more nuanced and dynamically variable. They become far more emergent in both structure and policy, while still subject to basic constraints needed for stability and fairness.

Traditional networks have rules that are either relatively open (but somewhat slow to change), or constrained by laws and customs (and thus resistant to change). Even our current social and information networks are constrained in important ways. Some examples:

• The US constitution defines the powers and the structures for the governing hierarchy, and processes for legislation and execution, made resilient by its provisions for self-amendable checks and balances. 
• Real-world social hierarchies have structures based on empowered people that tend to shift more or less slowly.
• Facebook has a social graph that is emergent, but the algorithms for filtering who sees what are strictly controlled by, and private to, Facebook. (In January they announced a major change --  unilaterally -- perhaps for the better for users and society, if not for content publishers, but reports quickly surfaced that it had unintended consequences when tested.)
• Google has a page graph that is given dynamic weight by the PageRank algorithm, but the management of that algorithm is strictly controlled by Google. It has been continuously evolving in important respects, but the details are kept secret to make it harder to game.

Our vaunted high-tech networks are controlled by corporate hierarchies (FANG: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google in much of the world, and BAT: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent in China) -- but are subject to limited levels of government control that vary in the US, EU, and China. This corporate control is a source of tension and resistance to change -- and a barrier to more emergent adaptation to changing needs and stressors (such as the Russian interference in our elections). These new monopolistic hierarchies extract high rents from the network -- meaning us, the users -- mostly indirectly, in the form of advertising and sales of personal data.

Smarter, more open and emergent algorithms -- APIs and a common carrier governance model

The answer to the question of governance is to make our network algorithms not only smarter, but more open to appropriate levels of individual and multi-party control. Business monopolies or oligarchies (or governments) may own and control essential infrastructure, but we can place limits on what they control and what is open. In the antitrust efforts of the past century governments found need to regulate rail and telephone networks as common carriers, with limited corporate-owner power to control how they are used, giving marketplace players (competitors and consumers) a share in that control. 

Initially this was rigid and regulated in great detail by the government, but the Carterfone decision showed how to open the old AT&T Bell System network to allow connection of devices not tested and approved by AT&T. Many forget how only AT&T phones could be used (except for a few cases of alternative devices like early fax machines that went through cumbersome and often arbitrary AT&T approval processes). Remember the acoustic modem coupler, needed because modems could not be directly connected? That changed when the FCC's decision opened the network up to any device that met defined electrical interface standards (using the still-familiar RJ11, a "Registered Jack").

Similarly only AT&T long-distance connections could be used, until the antitrust Consent Decree opened up competition among the "Baby Bells" and broke them off from Long Lines to compete on equal terms with carriers like MCI and Sprint. Manufacturing was also opened to new competitors.

In software systems, such plug-like interfaces are known as APIs (Application Program Interfaces), and are now widely accepted as the standard way to let systems interoperate with one another -- just enough, but no more -- much like a hardware jack does. This creates a level of modularity in architecture that lets multiple systems, subsystems, and components  interoperate as interchangeable parts -- extending the great advance of the first Industrial Revolution to software.

What I suggest as the next step in evolution of our networks is a new kind of common carrier model that recognizes networks like Facebook, Google, and Twitter as common utilities once they reach some level of market dominance. Then antitrust protections would mandate open APIs to allow substitution of key components by customers -- to enable them to choose from an open market of alternatives that offer different features and different algorithms. Some specific suggestions are below (including the very relevant model of sophisticated interoperablilty in electronic mail networks), but first, a bit more on the motivations.

Modularity, emergence, markets, transparency, and democracy

Systems architects have long recognized that modularity is essential to making complex systems feasible and manageable. Software developers saw from the early days that monolithic systems did not scale -- they were hard to build, maintain, or modify. (The picture here of the tar pits is from Fred Brooks classic 1972 book in IBM's first large software project.)  Web 2.0 extended that modularity to our network services, using network APIs that could be opened to the marketplace. Now we see wonderful examples of rich applications in the cloud that are composed of elements of logic, data, and analytics from a vast array of companies (such as travel services that seamlessly combine air, car rental, hotel, local attractions, loyalty programs, advertising, and tracking services from many companies).

The beauty of this kind of modularity is that systems can be highly emergent, based on the transparency and stability of published, open APIs, to quickly adapt to meet needs that were not anticipated. Some of this can be at the consumer's discretion, and some is enabled by nimble entrepreneurs. The full dynamics of the market can be applied, yet basic levels of control can be retained by the various players to ensure resilience and minimize abuse or failures.

The challenge is how to apply hierarchical control in the form of regulation in a way that limits risks, while enabling emergence driven by market forces. What we need is new focus on how to modularize critical common core utility services and how to govern the policies and algorithms that are applied, at multiple levels in the design of these systems (another, more hidden and abstract, kind of hierarchy). That can be done through some combination of industry self-regulation (where a few major players have the capability to do that, probably faster and more effectively than government), but by government where necessary (preferably only to the extent and duration necessary).

That obviously will be difficult and contentious, but it is now essential, if we are not to endure a new age of disorder, revolution, and war much like the age of religious war that followed Gutenberg (as Ferguson described). Silicon Valley and the rest of the tech world need to take responsibility for the genie they have let out of the bottle, and to mobilize to deal with it, and to get citizens and policymakers to understand the issues.

Once that progresses and is found to be effective, similar methods may eventually be applied to make government itself more modular, emergent, transparent, and democratic -- moving carefully toward "Democracy 2.0." (The carefully part is important -- Ferguson rightfully noted the dangers we face, and we have done a poor job of teaching our citizens, and our technologists, even the traditional principles of history, civics, and governance that are prerequisite to a working democracy.)

Opening the FANG walled gardens (with emphasis on Facebook and Google, plus Twitter)

This section outlines some rough ideas. (Some were posted in comments on an article in The Information by Sam Lessin, titled, "The Tower of Babel: Five Challenges of the Modern Internet.")

The fundamental principle is that entrepreneurs should be free to innovate improvements to these "essential" platforms -- which can then be selected by consumer market forces. Just as we moved beyond the restrictive walled gardens of AOL, and the early closed app stores (initially limited to apps created by Apple), we have unleashed a cornucopia of innovative Web services and apps that have made our services far more effective (and far more valuable to the platform owners as well, in spite of their early fears). Why should first movers be allowed to block essential innovation? Why should they have sole control and knowledge of the essential algorithms that are coming to govern major aspects of our lives? Why shouldn't our systems evolve toward fitness functions that we control and understand, with just enough hierarchical structure to prevent excessive instability at any given time?

Consider the following specific areas of opportunity.

Filtering rules. Filters are central to the function of Facebook, Google, and Twitter. As Ferguson observes, there are issues of homophily, filter bubbles, echo chambers, and fake news, and spoofing that are core to whether these networks make us smart or stupid, and whether we are easily manipulated to think in certain ways. Why do we not mandate that platforms be opened to user-selectable filtering algorithms (and/or human curators)? The major platforms can control their core services, but could allow users to select separate filters that interoperate with the platform. Let users control their filters, whether just by setting key parameters, or by substituting pluggable alternative filter algorithms. (This would work much like third party analytics in financial market data systems.) Greater competition and transparency would allow users to compare alternative filters and decide what kinds of content they do or do not want. It would stimulate innovation to create new kinds of filters that might be far more useful and smart.

For example, I have proposed strategies for filters that can help counter filter bubble effects by being much smarter about how people are exposed to views that may be outside of their bubble, doing it in ways that they welcome and want to think about. My post, Filtering for Serendipity -- Extremism, "Filter Bubbles" and "Surprising Validators" explains the need, and how that might be done. The key idea is to assign levels of authority to people based on the reputational authority that other people ascribe to them (think of it as RateRank, analogous to Google's PageRank algorithm). This approach also suggests ways to create smart serendipity, something that could be very valuable as well.

The "wisdom of the crowd" may be a misnomer when the crowd is an undifferentiated mob, but,  I propose seeking the wisdom of the smart crowd -- first using the crowd to evaluate who is smart, and then letting the wisdom of the smart sub-crowd emerge, in a cyclic, self-improving process (much as Google's algorithm improves with usage, and much as science is open to all, but driven by those who gain authority, temporary as that may be).

Social graphs: Why do Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others own separate, private forms of our social graph. Why not let other user agents interoperate with a given platform’s social graph? Does the platform own the data defining my social graph relationships or do I? Does the platform control how that affects my filter or do I? Yes, we may have different flavors of social graph, such as personal for Facebook and professional for LinkedIn, but we could still have distinct sub-communities that we select when we use an integrated multi-graph, and those could offer greater nuance and flexibility with more direct user control.

User agents versus network service agents: Email systems were modularized in Internet standards long ago, so that we compose and read mail using user agents (Outlook, Apple mail, Gmail, and others) that connect with federated remote mail transfer agent servers (that we may barely be aware of) which interchange mail with any other mail transfer agent to reach anyone using any kind of user agent, thus enabling universal connectivity.

Why not do much the same, to let any social media user agent interoperate with any other, using a federated social graph and federated message transfer agents? We could then set our user agent to apply filters to let us see whichever communities we want to see at any given time. Some startups have attempted to build stand-alone social networks that focus on sub-communities like family or close friends versus hundreds of more or less remote acquaintances. Why not just make that a flexible and dynamic option, that we can control at will with a single user agent? Why require a startup to build and scale all aspects of a social media service, when they could just focus on a specific innovation? (The social media UX can be made interoperable to a high degree across different user agents, just as email user agents handle HTML, images, attachments, emojis, etc. -- and as do competing Web browsers.)

Identity: A recurring problem with many social networks is abuse by anonymous users (often people with many aliases, or even just bots). Once again, this need not be a simple binary choice. It would not be hard to have multiple levels of participant, some anonymous and some with one or more levels of authentication as real human individuals (or legitimate organizations). First class users would get validated identities, and be given full privileges, while anonymous users might be permitted but clearly flagged as such, with second class privileges. That would allow users to be exposed to anonymous content, when desired, but without confusion as to trust levels. Levels of identity could be clearly marked in feeds, and users could filter out anonymous or unverified users if desired. (We do already see some hints of this, but only to a very limited degree.)

Value transfers and extractions: As noted above, another very important problem is that the new platform businesses are driven by advertising and data sales, which means the consumer is not the customer but the product. Short of simply ending that practice (to end advertising and make the consumer the customer), those platforms could be driven to allow customer choice about such intrusions and extractions of value. Some users may be willing opt in to such practices, to continue to get "free" service, and some could opt out, by paying compensatory fees -- and thus becoming the customer. If significant numbers of users opted to become the customer, then the platforms would necessarily become far more customer-first -- for consumer customers, not the business customers who now pay the rent.

I have done extensive work on alternative strategies that adaptively customize value propositions and prices to markets of one -- a new strategy for a new social contract that can shape our commercial relationships to sustain services in proportion to the value they provide, and our ability to pay, so all can afford service. A key part of the issue is to ensure that users are compensated for the value of the data they provide. That can be done as a credit against user subscription fees (a "reverse meter"), at levels that users accept as fair compensation. That would shift incentives toward satisfying users (effectively making the advertiser their customer, rather than the other way around). This method has been described in the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management: “A novel architecture to monetize digital offerings,” and very briefly in Harvard Business Review. More detail is my FairPayZone blog and my book (see especially the posts about the Facebook and Google business models that are listed in the opening section, above, and again at the end.*)

Analytics and metrics: we need access to relevant usage data and performance metrics to help test and assess alternatives, especially when independent components interact in our systems. Both developers and users will need guidance on alternatives. The Netflix Prize contests for improved recommender algorithms provided anonymized test data from Netflix to participant teams. Concerns about Facebook's algorithm, and the recent change that some testing suggests may do more harm than good, point to the need for independent review. Open alternatives will increase the need for transparency and validation by third parties.

(Sensitive data could be restricted to qualified organizations, with special controls to avoid issues like the Cambridge Analytica mis-use. The answer to such abuse is not greater concentration of power in one platform, as Maurice Stucke points out in Harvard Business Review, "Here Are All the Reasons It’s a Bad Idea to Let a Few Tech Companies Monopolize Our Data." (Facebook has already moved toward greater concentration of power.)

If such richness sounds overly complex, remember that complexity can be hidden by well-designed user agents and default rules. Those who are happy with a platform's defaults need not be affected by the options that other users might enable (or swap in) to customize their experience. We do that very successfully now with our choice of Web browsers and email user agents. We could have similar flexibility and choice in our platforms -- innovations that are valuable can emerge for use by early adopters, and then spread into the mainstream if success fuels demand. That is the genius of our market economy -- a spontaneous, emergent process for adaptively finding what works and has value -- in ways more effective than any hierarchy (as Ferguson extols, with reference to Smith, Hayek, and Levitt).

Augmentation of humans (and their networks)

Another very powerful aspect of networks and algorithms that many neglect is  the augmentation of human intelligence. This idea dates back some 60 years (and more), when "artificial intelligence" went through its first hype cycle -- Licklider and Engelbart observed that the smarter strategy is not to seek totally artificial intelligence, but to seek hybrid strategies that draw on and augment human intelligence. Licklider called it "man-computer symbiosis, and used ARPA funding to support the work of Engelbart on "augmenting human intellect." In an age of arcane and limited uses of computers, that proved eye-opening at a 1968 conference ("the mother of all demos"), and was one of the key inspirations for modern user interfaces, hypertext, and the Web.

The term augmentation is resurfacing in the artificial intelligence field, as we are once again realizing how limited machine intelligence still is, and that (especially where broad and flexible intelligence is needed) it is often far more effective to seek to apply augmented intelligence that works symbiotically with humans, retaining human visibility and guidance over how machine intelligence is used.

Why not apply this kind of emergent, reconfigurable augmented intelligence to drive a bottom up way to dynamically assign (and re-assign) authority in our networks, much like the way representative democracy assigns (and re-assigns) authority from the citizen up? Think of it as dynamically adaptive policy engineering (and consider that a strong bottom-up component will keep such "engineering" democratic and not authoritarian). Done well, this can keep our systems human-centered.

Reality is not binary:  "Everything is deeply intertwingled"

Ted Nelson (who coined the term "hypertext" and was another of the foundational visionaries of the Web), wrote in 1974 that "everything is deeply intertwingled." As he put it, "Hierarchical and sequential structures, especially popular since Gutenberg, are usually forced and artificial. Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged—people keep pretending they can make things hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can't."

It's a race:  augmented network hierarchies that are emergently smart, balanced, and dynamically adaptable -- or disaster

If we pull together to realize this potential, we can transcend the dichotomies and conflicts that are so wickedly complex and dangerous. Just as Malthus failed to account for the emergent genius of civilization, and the non-linear improvements it produces, many of us discount how non-linear the effect of smarter networks, with more dynamically augmented and balanced structures, can be. But we are racing along a very dangerous path, and are not being nearly smart or proactive enough about what we need to do to avert disaster. What we need now is not a top-down command and control Manhattan Project, but a multi-faceted, broadly-based movement, with elements of regulation, but primarily reliant on flexible, modular architectural design.

[Update 12/14/20] A specific proposal - Stanford Working Group on Platform Scale

An important proposal that gets at the core of the problems in media platforms was published in Foreign Affairs, How to Save Democracy From Technology, by Francis Fukuyama and others. See also the report of the Stanford Working Group. The idea is to let users control their social media feeds with open market interoperable filters. That is something I proposed here (in the "Filtering rules" section, above). Other regulatory proposals that include some of the suggestions made here are summarized in Regulating our Platforms -- A Deeper Vision.

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See the Selected Items tab for more on this theme.

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Coda:  On becoming more smartly intertwingled

Everything in our world has always been deeply intertwingled. Human intellect augmented with technology enables us to make our world more smartly intertwingled. But we have lost our way, in the manner that Engelbart alluded to in his illustration of de-augmentation -- we are becoming deeply polarized, addicted to self-destructive dopamine-driven engagement without insight or nuance. We are being de-augmented by our own technology run amok.


(I plan to re-brand this blog as "Smartly Intertwingled" -- that is the objective that drives my work. The theme of "User-Centered Media" is just one important aspect of that.)


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*On business models - FairPay (my other blog):  As noted above, a series of posts in my other blog focus on a novel approach to business models (and regulation that centers on that), and those posts remain my best presentation on those issues:

• Who Should Pay the Piper for Facebook? (& the rest) -- the core solution I propose
• Privacy AND Innovation ...NOT Oligopoly -- A Market Solution to a Market Problem -- a simple regulatory approach to change incentives without overreach.

2016: Fake News, Echo Chambers, Filter Bubbles and the "De-Augmentation" of Our Intellect

Silicon Valley, we have a problem!

The 2016 election has made it all too clear that growing concerns some of us had about the failing promise of our new media were far more acute than we had imagined. Stuart Elliott recently observed that "...the only thing easier to find than fake news is discussion of the phenomenon of fake news."

But as many have noted, this is a far bigger problem than just fake news (which is a reasonably tractable problem to solve). It is a problem of echo chambers and filter bubbles, and a still broader problem of critical thinking and responsible human relations. While the vision has been that new media could "augment human intellect," instead, it seems our media are "de-augmenting" our intellect. It is that deeper and more insidious problem that I focus on here.

The most specifically actionable ideas I have about reversing that are well described in my 2012 post, Filtering for Serendipity -- Extremism, "Filter Bubbles" and "Surprising Validators,"which has recently gotten attention from such influential figures as Tim O'Reilly and Eli Pariser. (Some readers may wish to jump directly to that post.)

This post aims at putting that in the broader, and more currently urgent context. As one who has thought about electronic social media, and how to enhance collaborative intelligence, and the "wisdom"/"madness" of crowds since the 1970s, I thought it timely to post on this again, expand on its context, and again offer to collaborate with those seeking remedies.

This post just touches on some issues that I hope to expand on in the future. This is a rich and complex challenge. Even perverse: as noted in my 2012 post, and again below, "balanced information may actually inflame extreme views." But at last there is a critical mass of people who realize this may be the most urgent problem in our Internet media world. Humanity may be on the road to self-destruction -- if we don't find a way to fix this fast.

Some perspectives -- augmenting or de-augmenting?

Around 1970 I was exposed to two seminal early digital media thinkers. Those looking to solve these problems today would do well to look back at this rich body of work. These problems are not new -- only newly critical.

• Doug Engelbart was a co-inventor of hypertext (the linking medium of the Web) and related tools, with the stated objective of "Augmenting Human Intellect."  His classic tech report memorably illustrated the idea of augmenting how we use media, such as writing to help us think, in terms of the opposite -- we can de-augment the task of writing with a pencil by tying the pencil to a brick! While the Web and social media have done much to augment our thinking and discourse, we now see that they are also doing much to de-augment it.
• Murray Turoff did important early work on social decision support and collaborative problem solving systems. These systems were aimed as consensus-seeking (initially focused on defense and emergency preparedness), and included the Delphi technique, with its specific methods for balancing the loudest and most powerful voices. 

Not so long after that, I visited a lab at what is now Verizon, to see a researcher (Nathan Felde) working with an experimental super-high resolution screen for multimedia (10,000 by 10,000 pixels, as I recall -- that is more than 10 times richer than the 4K video that is just now becoming generally available). He observed that after working with that, going back to a then-conventional screen was like "eating dinner through a straw" -- de-augmentation again.

Now we find ourselves in an increasingly "post-literate" media world, with TV sound bites, 140 character Tweets, and Facebook posts that are not much longer. We increasingly consume our media on small handheld screens -- mobile and hyper-connected, but displaying barely a few sentences -- eating food for our heads through a straw.*

What a fundamental de-augmentation this is, and why it matters is chillingly described in "Donald Trump, the first President of our Post-Literate Age," A Bloomberg View piece by Joe Weisenthal:

Before the invention of writing, knowledge existed in the present tense between two or more people; when information was forgotten, it disappeared forever. That state of affairs created a special need for ideas that were easily memorized and repeatable (so, in a way, they could go viral). The immediacy of the oral world did not favor complicated, abstract ideas that need to be thought through. Instead, it elevated individuals who passed along memorable stories, wisdom and good news.

And here we begin to see how the age of social media resembles the pre-literate, oral world. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and other platforms are fostering an emerging linguistic economy that places a high premium on ideas that are pithy, clear, memorable and repeatable (that is to say, viral). Complicated, nuanced thoughts that require context don’t play very well on most social platforms, but a resonant hashtag can have extraordinary influence. 

Farad Manjoo gives further perspective in "Social Media’s Globe-Shaking Power," closing with:

Mr. Trump is just the tip of the iceberg. Prepare for interesting times.

Engelbart and Turoff (and others such as Ted Nelson, the other inventor of hypertext) pointed the way to doing the opposite -- we urgently need to re-focus on that vision, and extend it for this new age.

Current voices for change

One prominent call for change was by Tim O'Reilly, a very influential publisher, widely respected as a thought leader in Internet circles. He posted on "Media in the Age of Algorithms" and triggered much comment (including my comment referring to my 2012 post, which Tim recommended).

Another prominent voice is Eli Pariser, who is known for his TED Talk and book on The Filter Bubble, a term he popularized in 2011. He recently created a collaborative Google Doc, which, as reported in Fortune," has become a hive of collaborative activity, with hundreds of journalists and other contributors brainstorming strategies for pushing back against publishers that peddle falsehoods" (I am one, contributing a section headed "Surprising Validators). The editable Doc is apparently generating so much traffic that a read-only copy has been posted!

Shelly Palmer did a nice post this summer, "Your Comfort Zone May Destroy The World." We need to not just exhort stepping outside our comfort zones, which few will do unaided, but to make our media smart about enticing us to do that in easy and compelling ways.

The way forward

As I said, this is a rich and complex challenge. Many of the obvious solutions are too simplistic. As my 2012 post begins:

Balanced information may actually inflame extreme views -- that is the counter-intuitive suggestion in a NY Times op-ed by Cass Sunstein, "Breaking Up the Echo" (9/17/12).   Sunstein is drawing on some very interesting research, and this points toward an important new direction for our media systems.

Please read that post to see why that is, how Sunstein suggests we might cut through that, and the filtering, rating, and ranking strategies I suggest for doing that. (The idea is to find and highlight what Sunstein called "Surprising Validators" -- people who you already give credence to, who suggest that your ideas might be wrong, at least in part -- enticing you to take a small step outside your comfort zone, and re-think, to see things just a bit more broadly.)

I hope to continue to expand on this, and to work with others on these vital issues in the near future.

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Supporting serious journalism

One other critical aspect of this larger problem is citizen-support of serious journalism -- not chasing clicks or commercial sponsorship, but journalism for citizens. My other blog on FairPay addresses that need, most recently with this companion post: Panic in the Streets! Now People are Ready to Patron-ize Journalism!

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See the Selected Items tab for more on this theme.

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*Relying on smartphones to feed our heads reminds me of my disappointment with clunky HyperCard on early Macs (the first widely available hypertext system -- nearly 20 years after the early full-screen demos that so impressed me!), with its tiny "cards" instead of pages of unlimited length. How happy I was to see Mosaic and Netscape browsers on full-sized screens finally appear some 5 years later. We are losing such richness as the price of mobility! (I am writing this with a triple-monitor desktop system, which I sorely miss when away from my office, even with a laptop or iPad. And I admit, I am not great at typing with just my thumbs. ...Does anyone have a spare brick?)

[Image:  Thanks to Eli Pariser and Shelly Palmer for the separate images that I mashed up for this post.]

Digital Camelot - The Once and Future Web of Engelbart and Nelson

If you care about modern culture and how technology is shaping it, this is worth thinking about -- A powerful eulogy for where the Web might have gone, and still may someday, and the friendship of the two people most responsible for envisioning the Web*  --  Ted Nelson's eulogy for his friend Doug Engelbart, as reported by John Markoff in The Times -- with Nelson's inimitable flair.

As Markoff says:

Theodor Holm Nelson, who coined the term hypertext, has been a thorn in the side of the computing establishment for more than a half century. Last week, in an encomium to his friend Douglas Engelbart, he took his critique to Shakespearean levels. It deserves a wider audience. 

Dr. Engelbart and Ted Nelson became acquaintances at the dawn of the modern computing era. They had envisioned and invented the computing that we have come to take for granted.

I first encountered both of them in 1969, and what I saw set the direction for my life's work.  Engelbart gave "The Mother of All Demos" in 1968 (I first saw him give a follow-up the next year, and then read most of his work).  Nelson dreamed of hypertext and hypermedia, and wrote papers on what he called "hypertext" in the '60s and the highly influential Whole Earth Catalog of "Computer Lib / Dream Machines" in 1974.

As Nelson laments, both received a degree of recognition, but both were marginalized. Powerful as it may be, expediency took the Web in more limiting directions.

Their ideas remain profound and forward looking. Anyone who really cares about the future of media, intellect, and culture, and how information technology can augment that, should consider their work.  Just because the Web took a turn to expediency in the past does not mean it will not realize its richer potential in the future. (One hint of that is noted in the next section.)

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As to Nelson's comment about "keeping the links outside the file," he refers to the important point that HTML embeds the links in the HTML file, which largely limits linking and annotating to the author/distributor of the HTML page. Nelson views this a crippling to the vision he and Engelbart (and Bush) had, in which links could be created by third parties and associated with the page from outside, thus allowing anyone to link from, annotate, and enhance any work.

I was struck by the fact that  interactive hypermedia centered on TV and video are becoming mainstream, and much of it now does keep the links outside the file. Perhaps just a primitive version of Engelbart and Nelson's ideas, but a step in the right direction that might lead to further movement, and maybe spill over into other Web services...

Prime examples are the growing use of Automatic Content Recognition (ACR), which recognize a program and current viewing time-position, and is used to associate independent linkbases with video.  This is occurring both with 2-screen apps like Shazam, Zeebox, and IntoNow (Yahoo), and with 1-screen apps in smart TVs from most of the major TV vendors, and with support from major studios.

Video seems to naturally make embedded links problematic (where to put them?).  The TV industry tried to embed the links into the content (in such forms as ATVEF trigger streams in the VBI, and more recently in cable operator OCAP/EBIF platforms), but this has proven difficult to get to mass market.  Meanwhile, ACR has become popular -- first on the fringes, but now increasingly accepted by both the market and the industry.  Studios like Fox are even opening up their TV enhancement content to let independents like Zeebox use that content apart from (and in competition with) the Fox apps.  They recognize that the value of their services is enhanced by letting others re-distribute enhancements to their shows (along with independent enhancements) -- anything to increase attention to their shows.

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*Of course there were others, most notably Vannevar Bush, who inspired both Engelbart and Nelson.

Social TV -- The "Killer App" for Coactive TV -- Ready for Ubiquity

Social TV promises to be the killer app for coactive TV (CoTV).  (A "killer application" is an application that is so desirable to users that it drives the adoption of a larger technology.  The concept emerged when spreadsheets and word processors drove the adoption of PCs, which have obviously broadened to far wider importance.)

There are a number of signs that Social TV is emerging as such a killer app (some mentioned in previous posts).

• IntoNow launched in January 2011 and was quickly acquired by Yahoo on 4/25/11, and Spot411 re-launched 7/18/11 as TVplus.  Both have gotten prominent press and both do fully automatic syncing to any program, without need for any involvement by the TV distributor. 
• The Wikipedia article on Social Television was created in 5/07 with 3,244 bytes, grew to 5,528 by the end of 2009, then grew to 10,469 by the end of 2010, and to 16,851 by 8/23/11.  It now includes a list of 32 such systems (not all of which involve two-screens).
• One of the most popular FIOS TV apps was the Twitter app.

Being a killer app does not mean it will ultimately dominate the use of the platform, but only that it drives early adoption.  I suggest there are other killer apps for coactive TV as well, and that the long term value will span a wide range of apps.

• From a user viewpoint, EPGs (electronic program guides) are another important killer app, not least because it is one the MSOs (multi-system operators, TV distributors) are embracing along with users.  EPGs showcase the value of the companion device to allow interaction with a nice UI, and without interfering with current viewing.   The irresistible power of the iPad UI and relatively open ecosystem has finally convinced the MSOs that they must go outside the box (at least as to the set-top box and the TV screen).  Comcast and Time Warner Cable have moved quickly to offer tablet-based EPGs and DVR programming.  The coactive EPG will evolve into the full "Media Concierge" service that I have been blogging about since 2005). 
• The real money to drive all of this is in advertising.  Obviously this will drive the service providers and advertisers, but I submit that users too will recognize and increasingly demand the value of well targeted ads that exploit the flexibility of coactive UIs to be unobtrusive.  Well targeted ads can be a valuable service, as long as they are no more intrusive than the viewer wants them to be (which may vary from time to time, and from ad to ad).  Coactive ads--driving from a short spot to a companion microsite (whether linked to live, or deferred using a bookmarking feature)--can be far less intrusive and far more useful than a longer TV ad with no coactive companion element. A good UI can give the user control over when and how such ads appear.

All of these promising killer apps have synergy with one another.  Coactive TV is at heart hypermedia, and thus "everything is deeply intertwingled." (Quoting Ted Nelson, who also coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia.)

• Social TV apps can work both as program enhancements and to provide program guide/media concierge services.  
• Social TV can also be about ads, such as during the Superbowl, or when any ad of interest to my social circle appears.
• All of these will drive usage of enhancement content (such as IMDB pages), which will create further synergies.

But there is one more thing that is essential, and that is ubiquity. While full, ubiquitous coactivity is not central to all Social TV, I suggest it is essential to enabling it to reach scale.

• Synchronizing Web browsing to TV can be done manually, and has for decades.  Viewers have created their own Social TV ever since the first two people sat with a laptop in front of a TV, and ever since the first online chat about a TV program.  It can also be automated with program specific apps.  ABC did it a decade ago with Enhanced TV for the Oscars and other shows, and now on the iPad for Grey's Anatomy, but program and network apps cannot create massive synergy.
• What is essentially to enabling Social TV (and most other CoTV apps) to cross the chasm is ubiquity.  Siloing companion apps to a separate app for each network or program or advertiser is hugely self-defeating.  How many users will load more than a few apps, and how many will bother to open those apps more than once?  Just as the Web eliminated the need for separate apps for every content service, a ubiquitous CoTV service will require only a single context-linking app to reach services for every program, to every Web service. There will be all kinds of mashups driven by that context, but an effective context-linking service must be essentially universal.

A truly ubiquitous coactive TV service will be always on, and always aware of a viewer's TV context (except when disabled).  Such a ubiquitous service can activate any Web service and any application, in a rich ecology much like that on the Web.  That way a user can just set up the coactive companion context service just once, and get synchronized for any program or ad, to any social networking service, content service, or whatever -- whether directly, or via mashups.  (Just how such services can be structured to enable flexibility and user control was described in my published patent disclosures, and will be a subject of  future posts.)

It now appears that Social TV is the next big thing in TV, and will drive full coactivity -- but a whole lot of other functions will ride its coattails.

My Intellectual Ventures Inventor Profile

Recently I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Intellectual Ventures for a story about my work as an inventor. I have been looking forward to seeing it posted in their new Inventor Spotlight area. Unfortunately, I still have to wait a bit. My story was one of the first to be written, but my deal was fairly complex, and they want to work up to that. So, while I wait for them to present the story, here is a teaser.

For those of you who have not been paying attention, Intellectual Ventures is remaking the patent business. They have gradually become less secretive -- having raised $5 billion to acquire over 30,000 patents since 2000, they are having a huge effect, much of it yet to be seen, and are still viewed with awe by some, and fear by others. Their story has been covered extensively in the press.

As an inventor, and a believer in what technology can enable, I think they are changing things very much for the better.

Some of my history as an inventor -- my twelve year struggle from conception to monetization of my first patented invention -- was outlined in a 2008 blog post. That did not get into how I partnered with others to develop my patents, leading to a sale for $35 million. I faced most of the challenges of the lone inventor, unable to get large companies to a reasonable deal without litigation, even with professional partners to lead and fund the effort. I always viewed litigation as a very unpleasant and wasteful prospect, and two years into a hugely expensive and draining case (even with other people's money), I was eager to end it as soon as possible.

That is where the market came to the rescue. The IV case study will give more details, but, in brief, I saw them change the game from a brutal, zero-sum battle (attractive only to lawyers) to a win-win business proposition that was beneficial to all. They brought unique insight into the market forces, great cleverness in structuring deals that I understand to have been first of their kind, and mastery in moving the warring sides to a deal quickly, overcoming many stumbling blocks.

The deal provided my company, Teleshuttle, with the resources to let me focus on my work as an inventor, which is the work I love and do best.*

I look forward to seeing the story of this landmark deal on IV's Web site, and to IV's contribution to developing the market becoming more widely known and understood. IV deserves credit for leading the way toward a world in which invention is more sensibly valued, rewarded, and stimulated -- to make life better for all of us.

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*For example, there is my current work on the FairPay pricing process, described extensively on [the FairPayZone**] blog: I have patent filings related to this, but they may or may not ever have any value. Nevertheless, because some of my patents have brought in funds, I can develop FairPay essentially as a pro-bono project, just because I think it is an idea the world will benefit from.

There is a parallel here: Just as IV found a way to arrange a fair value exchange between me as innovator and those who benefit from my ideas, I put forth FairPay as a way to arrange a fair value exchange between those who create content/services and those who benefit from that.

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[**This post was originally posted on the FairPayZone blog on 4/27/11, but has been moved here as more fitting. 

Comments:  a few comments can be found on the original posting at FairPayZone.com]

TVs, iPads, Time Warner Cable, and Viacom -- Copyright vs. Copyrape

The latest overreach of copyright owners over the Time Warner Cable iPad TV app is an interesting encapsulation of all that is wrong with the current excesses of copyright.

I see this as a key policy issue relating my theme of "user-centered media" -- one that gets to the heart of the social contract behind copyright and all intellectual property. The key question is the balance of what is good for users, and what is fair incentive to content creators. The Constitution wisely embraced that balance, but many have lost sight of it.

The case reported by the NY Times Media Decoder is a classic of overreach (and one in which I find myself in the surprising position of supporting the cable companies).  As the Times reports, Viacom pleads that Time Warner Cable’s actions “will interfere with Viacom’s opportunities to license content to third-party broadband providers and to successfully distribute programming on its own broadband delivery sites.”  Let's think about that, both from a technical and a policy perspective.  This is not really a question of TWC vs. Viacom, but of the public vs. the rights-holders.

First, an quick look shows how silly this is from a technical perspective:

• Doesn't Time Warner's distribution of Viacom channels to TVs in the home limit "Viacom’s opportunities to license content to third-party broadband providers?"  If I could not get The Daily Show from TWC, I would certainly be much more inclined to use Hulu for it.  Why does Viacom allow that?
• How is an iPad different from a TV?  (Answer keeping in mind that this is the 21st Century.) 
• I have a Blu-Ray player and a Mac Mini both HDMI-connected to my TV, so I can watch any "third-party broadband provider" programming on my TV, and don't need TWC if Viacom is available through other providers. I can view such broadband provider content on any screen I like, and they are completely free to compete with TWC.  (Such any-screen connectivity will soon be the norm.)
• Why should TWC be locked off the iPad when Hulu is sold rights to distribute Viacom programming to any Internet-connected screen, including both TVs and iPads.
• Remember also that both TWC cable TV and broadband in TWC-served homes both arrive as RF signals running in different channels on the same coaxial cable!
• Once more, what century is this?

But this is really a deeper question of policy, and both content owners and content users seem to forget the basic social contract that drives copyright.  Let's step back to those basics:

• Copyright is designed to maximize social welfare by encouraging content creation
• Copyright owners are given limited rights as their incentive to create content
• The public pays to compensate creators for content.
• The public also may pay distributors and device manufacturers for facilitating access to content, but that has nothing to do with copyright.  (I have to pay for a book of Shakespeare plays or the Bible, or to download it to my cell phone in Timbuktu, but the content is free.)

Thus various parties have rights to compensation:

• The creators of Viacom content have rights to compensation for their content.
• Viacom is entitled to collect such copyright-related compensation, as well as compensation for their contribution to distribution (as well as some profit).
• Distributors and device providers are entitled to compensation for distribution and devices (which, again, has nothing to do with copyright).

But the viewer who pays for content has purchased the right to enjoy that content.  That can take a number of forms, but none are tied to what screen the viewer is using.  For a single viewer (or household, or whatever unit is bought):

• I can pay for time-limited access (such as a streamed subscription) or for permanent access (such as a download or DVD).
• Those costs may be bundled with distribution and device costs, but the underlying copyright fee is a simple and distinct component of that bundle.
• Any copyright-based limitation to content by device or location or technology that goes beyond the simple distinction of time-limited or unlimited access is without foundation.  Such limitations might be forced by technical limitations, but once those technical limitations disappear, they have no basis.

So if I pay for a Viacom program (content) one time, for a month, or forever, I should have unlimited rights to enjoy viewing that content, one time, for that month, or forever.  There might also be software fees for apps, and bandwidth fees for distribution, but there is no basis for any further content viewing fee.*

The copyright owners seem to have forgotten that the maze of licensing that they have so many lawyers working on is mostly an accident of technological history.  Hopefully the courts will not lose sight of the basics and let the tail wag the dog, now that technology is liberating us.  Hopefully they will not let copyright turn into copyrape.

Content does not want to be free, if its creator wants compensation (subject to his limited copyright).  But once I have paid for a license, I should be free to view it as I like, for whatever amount of viewing I have paid the creator for.  Watching multiple times might be a multiple use, but watching on one screen rather than another is not a different use.

Ask not for whom the copyright tolls, it tolls for thee -- for the public welfare.

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*A related issue is the current idea that cable-sourced access might be limited to in-home viewing.  That too is an artificial limitation,with no inherent justification.  It may be hard to prevent abuse of licenses, if I can let all my friends view my TWC content in their homes, but as long as TWC has the technical means to limit viewing to valid subscribers (and those viewing with them) why should there be any geographic restriction limiting out of home viewing? 

Hyperlocal News symposium by MIT Enterprise Forum of NYC -- 2/24

Hyperlocal News: A New of World of Journalism, Sustainable Business Models, and the $30B Local Ad Market promises to be a very interesting NYC panel session.  As board organizer of the event for MITEF-NYC, I am pleased to have a very strong and diverse mix of panelists, and look forward to some stimulating dialog.  Aside from major players like the NY Times and Patch, we have a smaller startup, the Alternative Press, and Outside.in, a technology/infrastructure provider.

A very nice preview article on the event, and on the MIT Enterprise Forum, was published today by The Alternative Press.

From my "user-centered media" perspective, hyperlocal is an interesting development, with farther to go in use-centered control of locality -- as to geography, time, and context.  Instead of just a newspaper focused on my community, I want to see more context sensitivity and control.  Sometimes I want to know:

• why there are sirens in my neighborhood right now (more and longer than usual, this being Manhattan)?
• what are the fireworks I see on the Hudson now, and how do I get advance notice of them?
• what events match my interest profile (graded by distance vs. level of interest)?
• about my home location, my work location, or a location I am visiting or passing through.

I don't know that the panel will get to these questions, but there are many other interesting ones they will address.  I have been involved in various online news services since the late '80s, and what I see as interesting is not always shared by the powers that be.

One of my recent projects (with impact yet to be determined) is a radically new pricing process for digital media called FairPay.  This has strong potential for news services, including hyperlocal ones.  More on that is on the at my FairPay Zone blog.

Of course I will be at the event, and will be happy to discuss FairPay, and other user-centered issues, with anyone there.