Looking at fallout of the KOSA hearings today — and subsequent commentary — I remain optimistic for the development of social technology & communication but I’m beginning to think the open web may basically “Do a Yahoo!” and fade, largely because of our self-appointed privacy, safety and national-security activists.
We are living at an unfortunate confluence of several movements in civil society and politics:
- people who believe that online speech is directly comparable to physical harm
- people who believe that they need the ability to proactively chill the communications of others in order to be safe
- celebrities who opine that anonymity and anonymous abuse is a massive problem for them, when actually it isn’t
- anti-corporatist activists who blindly believe that anything which “hurts” GAFAM* must be good for privacy because GAFAM are the primary enemy of privacy
- safety activists and people who believe that platforms should be policing kids browsing and interactions, rather than parents and kids themselves
- privacy activists who killed cookies to protect us from GAFAM “tracking” thereby wiping-out competition in advertising, imperilling small business, and encouraging some of the largest platforms (Chrome, iOS) to simply spy on us instead
- failing and minor platforms which — given the death of cookies — may perceive the KnowYourCustomer™ elements of safety-demanded “age verification” as a potential parachute for their advertising revenue
- political and legal activists who demand “data localism” because they believe that data protection hinges greatly upon lawyers having local CEOs and preventing seizure of servers, perhaps than it does upon preventing intrusion, scraping and hacking
- small-c conservatives who see disenfranchisement of minority and anonymous access to internet as being a moral benefit
- security services, sitting in the middle of this hurricane, trying to make it whirl faster because making all internet activity attributable and trackable is food for their existence
We are in for a rough few years. There will be losses. The “app” ecosystem will likely take a big — possibly majority — chunk out of the “open web” as users demand features which are more easily built without the abstraction of traditional web/web-like services.
“App Stores” will be caught between competing regulators who want them to be more open, versus those who want them to police software functionality and user attributes. The users will suffer in the middle of this Godzilla battle, but nobody cares about them.
And actual privacy and anonymity will be on the back foot for a decade or more.
[*] GAFAM / Google Apple Facebook Amazon Microsoft TikTok Twitter X … whatever the acronym is today.
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