Dave Farber
2018-07-01 00:24:56 UTC
Date: June 30, 2018 at 22:31:58 GMT+9
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Competition, Civil Liberties, and the Internet Giants
Competition, Civil Liberties, and the Internet Giants
By MITCH STOLTZ, CORYNNE MCSHERRY, CINDY COHN, AND DANNY OâBRIEN
Jun 27 2018
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/competition-civil-liberties-and-internet-giants>
The power of the Internet historically arose from its edges: innovation, growth, and freedom came from its users and their contributions, rather than from some centrally controlled core of overseers. But today, for an increasing number of users, there is a powerful center to the netâand a potentially uncompetitive and unrepresentative center at that.
The whole Internet itself is still vast and complex, enabling billions of users to communicate regardless of their physical location. Billions of websites, apps, and nearly costless communications channels remain open to all. Yet too many widely relied-upon functions are now controlled by a few giant companies. Worse, unlike previous technology cycles, the dominance of these companies has proven to be sticky. Itâs still easy and cheap to put up a website, build an app, or organize a group of people onlineâbut a few large corporations dominate the key resources needed to do those things. That, in turn, gives those companies extraordinary power over speech, privacy, and innovation.
Some Specifics
Google and Facebook dominate the tools of information discovery and the advertising networks that track usersâ every move across much of the Western world. Along with Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, and a few similar companies, they moderate an enormous volume of human communication. This gives them extraordinary power to censor and to surveil.
Amazon dominates online retail in the United States and back-end hosting across much of the globe, making it a chokepoint for a broad range of other services and activities. A few credit card networks process most online payments, giving them the power to starve any organization that relies on sales or donations. Even more fundamentally, most people in the U.S. have little or no ability to choose which company will connect them to the Internet in the first place. That gives a few broadband ISPs the power to block, throttle, and discriminate against Internet users.
Civil Liberties at Stake
A lack of competition and choice impacts nearly every facet of Internet usersâ civil liberties. When so much of our interaction with friends, family, and broader social circles happens on Facebook, its arrangement and takedowns of content matter. When so much search happens on Google, and so much video discovery on YouTube, their rankings of results and recommendations matter. When Google, Facebook, and Amazon amass a huge trove of peopleâs communications as well as data about purchases, physical movements, and Internet use, their privacy policies and practices matter. When Comcast and AT&T are the only options for fixed broadband Internet access for millions of people, their decisions to block, throttle or prioritize certain traffic matter.
The influence of these companies is so great that their choices can impact our lives as much as any governmentâs. And as Amazonâs recent sale of facial recognition technology to local police demonstrates, the distance between the big tech companies and government is shrinking.
Diverse Voices Need Diverse Options
Careful action to bring a variety of options back in these important portions of the Internet could re-empower users. Competitionâcombined with and fostered by meaningful interoperability and data portabilityâcould let users vote with their feet by leaving a platform or service that isnât working for them and taking their data and connections to one that does. That would encourage companies to work to keep their users rather than hold them hostage.
More competition can also strengthen civil liberties. Innovators could develop alternative apps and platforms that safeguard their usersâ speech, protect their privacy, foster community, and promote constructive debate, confident that those tools will have a level playing field to reach potential users. And those alternatives donât have to be commercial: decentralized, federated, or other co-operative solutions can put power back into the hands of their users, giving them the ability to change and adapt tools.
Increasing competition by itself wonât fix all of these problems. But itâs one of the few strategies that, if handled correctly by courts and policymakers, has the promise of opening up space for innovation from the bottom up, driven by individuals, small businesses, and communities with great ideas.
The good news is some competition does exist. We have surveillance-free search by companies like DuckDuckGo and Qwant, open source social media tools like Mastodon and Secure Scuttlebutt, independent services like Snapchat and Yelp, and competitive ISPs like Sonic, just to name a few. But many of these are under threat from the giants, and many, many more options are needed.
[snip]
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-------------------------------------------Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Competition, Civil Liberties, and the Internet Giants
Competition, Civil Liberties, and the Internet Giants
By MITCH STOLTZ, CORYNNE MCSHERRY, CINDY COHN, AND DANNY OâBRIEN
Jun 27 2018
<https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/competition-civil-liberties-and-internet-giants>
The power of the Internet historically arose from its edges: innovation, growth, and freedom came from its users and their contributions, rather than from some centrally controlled core of overseers. But today, for an increasing number of users, there is a powerful center to the netâand a potentially uncompetitive and unrepresentative center at that.
The whole Internet itself is still vast and complex, enabling billions of users to communicate regardless of their physical location. Billions of websites, apps, and nearly costless communications channels remain open to all. Yet too many widely relied-upon functions are now controlled by a few giant companies. Worse, unlike previous technology cycles, the dominance of these companies has proven to be sticky. Itâs still easy and cheap to put up a website, build an app, or organize a group of people onlineâbut a few large corporations dominate the key resources needed to do those things. That, in turn, gives those companies extraordinary power over speech, privacy, and innovation.
Some Specifics
Google and Facebook dominate the tools of information discovery and the advertising networks that track usersâ every move across much of the Western world. Along with Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, and a few similar companies, they moderate an enormous volume of human communication. This gives them extraordinary power to censor and to surveil.
Amazon dominates online retail in the United States and back-end hosting across much of the globe, making it a chokepoint for a broad range of other services and activities. A few credit card networks process most online payments, giving them the power to starve any organization that relies on sales or donations. Even more fundamentally, most people in the U.S. have little or no ability to choose which company will connect them to the Internet in the first place. That gives a few broadband ISPs the power to block, throttle, and discriminate against Internet users.
Civil Liberties at Stake
A lack of competition and choice impacts nearly every facet of Internet usersâ civil liberties. When so much of our interaction with friends, family, and broader social circles happens on Facebook, its arrangement and takedowns of content matter. When so much search happens on Google, and so much video discovery on YouTube, their rankings of results and recommendations matter. When Google, Facebook, and Amazon amass a huge trove of peopleâs communications as well as data about purchases, physical movements, and Internet use, their privacy policies and practices matter. When Comcast and AT&T are the only options for fixed broadband Internet access for millions of people, their decisions to block, throttle or prioritize certain traffic matter.
The influence of these companies is so great that their choices can impact our lives as much as any governmentâs. And as Amazonâs recent sale of facial recognition technology to local police demonstrates, the distance between the big tech companies and government is shrinking.
Diverse Voices Need Diverse Options
Careful action to bring a variety of options back in these important portions of the Internet could re-empower users. Competitionâcombined with and fostered by meaningful interoperability and data portabilityâcould let users vote with their feet by leaving a platform or service that isnât working for them and taking their data and connections to one that does. That would encourage companies to work to keep their users rather than hold them hostage.
More competition can also strengthen civil liberties. Innovators could develop alternative apps and platforms that safeguard their usersâ speech, protect their privacy, foster community, and promote constructive debate, confident that those tools will have a level playing field to reach potential users. And those alternatives donât have to be commercial: decentralized, federated, or other co-operative solutions can put power back into the hands of their users, giving them the ability to change and adapt tools.
Increasing competition by itself wonât fix all of these problems. But itâs one of the few strategies that, if handled correctly by courts and policymakers, has the promise of opening up space for innovation from the bottom up, driven by individuals, small businesses, and communities with great ideas.
The good news is some competition does exist. We have surveillance-free search by companies like DuckDuckGo and Qwant, open source social media tools like Mastodon and Secure Scuttlebutt, independent services like Snapchat and Yelp, and competitive ISPs like Sonic, just to name a few. But many of these are under threat from the giants, and many, many more options are needed.
[snip]
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