Hal Hodson reports on a fledgling movement to take back the Internet from the big sites in NewScientist (23 July 2016, paywall):
AT THE heart of the internet are monsters with voracious appetites. In bunkers and warehouses around the world, vast arrays of computers run the show, serving up the web – and gorging on our data. …
“Very big and powerful companies own a huge chunk of what happens on the web,” says Andrei Sambra, a developer with the World Wide Web (W3) Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the main standards organisation for the web. But we – the ones producing this valuable data – have lost control.
So what’s to be done?
Sambra is working on a project called Solid, which is led by none other than [Tim] Berners-Lee [inventor of the Web] himself. The idea behind this prototype software is to separate our data from the apps and servers that process it. With Solid, you get to decide where your data lives – on your phone, a server at work, or with a cloud provider, as it probably does now. You can even nominate friends to look after it. “We want to put the data in a place where the user controls it,” says Sambra.
Here’s an academic introduction to Solid by Berners-Lee and his team:
Each user stores their data in a Web-accessible personal online datastore (or pod). Each user can have one or more pods from different pod providers, and can easily switch between providers. Applications access data in users’ pods using well defined protocols, and a decentralized authentication and access control mechanism guarantees the privacy of the data. In this decentralized architecture, applications can operate on users’ data wherever it is stored. Users control access to their data, and have the option to switch between applications at any time. We will demonstrate the utility of Solid and how it is experienced from the point of view of end users and application developers. …
Each application (or set of applications based on one social network platform) controls its own data and often has its own authentication and access control mechanisms. As a result, users cannot easily switch between similar applications that could allow reuse of their data, or switch from one data storage service to a different one.
I think that last outtake strikingly summarizes the goal – if, say, there was a Facebook-2 out there, a competitor to Facebook, how hard would it be to switch over to it? Today, difficult – all the information that you value on Facebook, such as “friend” information, groups, etc, is owned by Facebook – Facebook-2 has no access to it. Imagine, if you will, that the information was not owned by Facebook, but was owned by you. This implies that both Facebook’s would have to know how to access your information – and you have given access permission to them – or not. Now the competition is sharpened.
There’s a lot of questions that will be inevitably asked of Solid, assuming it makes progress, both technical and social, and perhaps I’ll pursue them in future posts after digesting the previously linked paper, as it may have answers to many that cross my mind. Instead, I’d rather return to Hodson’s article. This bothers me:
Andy Clarke, a philosopher studying artificial intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, UK, says that our loss of control goes even deeper. “When we use the internet in the ways it’s mostly available – through big nodes like Google and Facebook – we are giving ourselves away,” says Clarke. They are making big bucks out of us, and we don’t get a penny. Aral Balkan, founder of Swedish tech democratisation movement Ind.ie, calls such companies “people farmers”. If you’re not paying, you’re the product.
First, tThis strikes me as sloppy thinking. First, the use of the currency metaphor constricts the intellectual discourse to mere money. Rather, let’s ask this: does the work of these “big nodes” benefit us in any way? And the answer may be YES, in that we may be served marketing material for products we actually desire, to come up with just a single example; I suspect there are many more.
Second, all value is subjective: this is standard. All that trivial information associated to you has very little value to you; even as single bits, Google doesn’t care. But aggregated, then it begins to matter. By collecting it (a non-trivial activity) and analyzing it (also non-trivial) they are creating value from the detritus of us. This phrase, “They are making big bucks out of us, and we don’t get a penny”, is little more than rabble-rousing, and it’s unfortunate that it’s present in this interesting paper on disconnecting data from programs1.
I’d recommend taking a look at that paper (I may need a rainy afternoon, and it’s sunny right now) to see a possible future for the web – whether you’re a technical person or just a web user. It echoes, in my mind, the problems faced by the labor force with respect to unions in that sometimes workers don’t like the activities their unions take, and yet they find they often must belong. One solution has been Right To Work laws, which permit workers to opt out of the unions that represent them, but they are imperfect solutions. And perhaps this analogy is imperfect, but it does stick in my mind.
1I dislike this trendy word “apps”.
