A plea for protocols
The antidote to the abuses of big tech is the very thing that gave birth to the Internet itself: decentralized, neutral technical protocols.
-
The thought that inspires
my work. Ever since I started
work on Nupedia and then Wikipedia, a thought has always
inspired me: just imagine the stunning possibilities when people
come together as individuals to share their knowledge, to create
something much greater than any of them could achieve individually. -
The sharing economy. There
is a general phrase describing this sort of laudable activity: the
“sharing economy.” The motivations and rewards are different
when we work to benefit everyone indiscriminately. It worked well
when Linux and OSS were first developed; then it worked just as well
with Wikipedia. -
The Internet itself is an
instance of the sharing economy. The Internet—its ease of
communication and publishing together with its decentralized
nature—is precisely what has made this possible. The Internet is a
decentralized network of people working together freely, for mutual
benefit. -
The Internet giants have
abused the sharing economy. About ten years ago, this all
started to change. More and more our sharing behavior has been
diverted into massive private networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and
YouTube, that have exerted control and treated contributors as the
product. -
Facebook’s contempt for
our privacy. All you want to do is easily share a picture with
your family. At first, we thought Facebook’s handling of our
private data would just be the price we had pay for a really
powerful and useful service. But over and over, Facebook has shown
utter contempt for our privacy, and it has recently started
censoring more and more groups based on their viewpoints. We don’t
know where this will end. -
This aggression will not
stand, man. We need to learn from the success of
decentralized projects like Linux, open source software, Wikipedia,
and the neutral technical protocols that define the Internet itself,
that we don’t have to subject
ourselves to the tender mercies of the Internet giants. -
How.
How? Just
think. The Internet is made up of a network of computers that work
according to communication rules that they have all agreed on. These
communication rules are called protocols and
standards. -
Protocols
and standards... There
are protocols and standards
for transferring
and displaying
web pages, for email, for transferring files, and for all the many
different technologies
involved. -
...which
are neutral.These
different standards are neutral. They explicitly don’t care what
sort of content they carry, and they don’t benefit any person or
group over another. -
We need more
knowledge-sharing protocols. So here’s the thought I want to
leave you with. You evidently support knowledge sharing, since
you’re giving people awards for it. Knowledge sharing is so easy
online precisely because of those neutral technical protocols.
So—why don’t we invent many, many more neutral Internet
protocols for the sharing of knowledge? -
Blockchain is awesome
because it creates new technical protocols. Probably the biggest
reason people are excited about blockchain is that it is a
technology and a movement that gets rid of the need of the Internet
giants. Blockchain is basically a technology that enables us to
invent lots and lots of different protocols, for pretty much
everything. -
Why
not Twitter- and Facebook-like protocols? There
can, and should, be a protocol for
tweeting without Twitter.
Why should we have to rely on one company and one website when we
want to broadcast short messages to the world? That should be
possible without
Twitter. Similarly, when we want to share various other tidbits of
personal information, we should be able to agree on a protocol to
share
that ourselves, under our
own terms—without
Facebook. -
Wikipedia centralizes,
too. Although Wikipedia is an example of decentralized editing,
it is still centralized in an important way. If you want to
contribute to the world’s biggest collection of encyclopedia
articles, you have no choice but to collaborate with, and negotiate
with, Wikipedians. What if you can single-handedly write a better
article than Wikipedia’s? Wikipedia offers you no way to get your
work in front of its readers. -
Everipedia,
an encyclopedia protocol. Again,
there should be a neutral encyclopedia protocol,
one that allows us to add
encyclopedia articles
to a shared database that its creators own and develop, just like
the Internet itself. That’s why I’m working on Everipedia, which
is building a blockchain encyclopedia.
This is a little speech I gave to the Rotary Club of Pasadena, in the beautiful Pasadena University Club, January 31, 2019.
