Re: No Phone Home statement by ACLU, EFF, Brave, CDT, etc.

On Sat, 2025-06-07 at 20:46 -0700, Andrew Hughes wrote:
> Is anyone here fighting the good fight against over-identification?
> There’s a tiny glimmer of it in these threads - laws are changing to
> require authenticated internet access, 

Unfortunately, the design of the early Web, and the lack of provenance
tracking in Web technologies (including RDF and LD [1]) means that the
Web gives Power of Anonymity without the balance of Accountability.

In principle VCs could help redress that balance, and it’s unfortunate
that they couldn’t really have existed before the Web, and been built
in.

There’ve been attempts to take away the “common carrier’ protection of
ISPs and phone companies, and if that happened, as you say, ID would be
needed in order to use the Web, for liability protection. The people
trying to take away the CC protection are not, i think, especially
aware of that ramification. So far they don’t appear to have succeeded,
although it came close with some of the net neutrality in-fighting, as
an unintended consequence.

liam

PS: will probably wander off soon. It’s been fabulous to stand back and
see the successes of this group and the WG. I’m primarily keeping an
eye out exactly for the use case of provenance and, in a sense,
accountable anonymity.

-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.delightfulcomputing.com/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/XSLT/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y training, work & consulting.
Barefoot Web-slave, antique illustrations:  http://www.fromoldbooks.org