Re: A thought experiment: writing a report on intermediary protocols

> Il 07/02/2022 06:02 Chris Riley <me@mchrisriley.com> ha scritto:
> 
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I wanted to float an idea for the group's consideration - a proposal that something concrete we could work on together, contextualized within evolving regulatory developments. We could dig into the challenges that will arise from, and start to lay the groundwork for, third-party intermediaries to the intermediaries - specifically, recommendation systems that we could plug in between the user and platform service providers to give greater agency to end users with respect to social, search, etc.
> 
This is an idea that has been circulating for a while. Article 19 is a supporter and I actually was in a panel with Cory Doctorow and Marcel Kolaja (the EP vicepresident from the Pirate Party) discussing it at the last U.N. IGF in Poland. It's a nice idea, but it fundamentally fails to address two of the most basic problems, i.e. privacy (as you would still be required to use the dominant platform, have an account there accepting their T&Cs, give them all your data and let them track you) and consolidation (it actually removes one of the few reasons why people get fed up and try alternative social networks such as Mastodon even if almost no one is there).

This could be slightly different if, as in your graph, recommender systems could also work as aggregators across multiple platforms, but that won't happen unless we get interoperability, and once we get interoperability, IMHO it's much easier to just switch to a different "home platform" that gives you a better content curation algorithm *and* actual privacy. Then, if we also managed to decouple the curation from the "own content hosting" part of the service and multiply choices, detached recommenders would be a plus. But IMHO it is an optimization after you solve the basic problem, which is opening up the walled gardens.

--

Vittorio Bertola | Head of Policy & Innovation, Open-Xchange
vittorio.bertola@open-xchange.com  mailto:vittorio.bertola@open-xchange.com
Office @ Via Treviso 12, 10144 Torino, Italy