Re: [EXT] Re: Seeking some info

David, great points, I agree completely. In the offline world, one legal recourse that has (sometimes) helped individual consumers “level the playing field” with large companies (and their vastly superior legal resources) is class action lawsuits<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_action>.

What is coming with the emergence of decentralized identity wallets and agents is a different kind of reverse leverage: large-scale consumer-driven governance frameworks (aka trust frameworks). Rather than wait until harm has happened, these governance frameworks can specify the terms that a large group of consumers have collectively decided are fair, and then market forces can help convince large companies to agree to operate under those terms.

This is work Doc and Joyce Searls have been leading at Customer Commons<https://customercommons.org/> for years. With decentralized identity, we may finally be in striking distance of realizing their vision.

=Drummond

From: David Booth <david@dbooth.org>
Date: Sunday, February 12, 2023 at 1:01 PM
To: public-credentials@w3.org <public-credentials@w3.org>
Subject: [EXT] Re: Seeking some info
On 2/12/23 14:10, Bob Wyman wrote:
> . . .
> Current law, in many jurisdictions, now protects individuals from
> government abridgement of rights. But those same laws usually don't
> protect us from abridgements which result from contractual
> relationships between individuals and corporations.

Agreed, and people are so conditioned to mindlessly accept ridiculously
long click-through agreements, that companies could easily have people
signing away their entire digital identities without knowing it.

Case in point: Last I looked, indeed.com's click-through agreement was a
whopping 100 pages!!!  At an average of $300/hour for an attorney, it
would cost a consumer thousands of dollars just to have it reviewed.

Big companies and consumers do NOT have equal bargaining power in
negotiating these click-through agreements.  The "free market" doesn't
work when the parties do not have equal bargaining power.  That's why we
have anti-trust laws to regulate monopolies, and why we need similar
laws regarding click-through agreements.

David Booth