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

On Mon, Feb 7, 2022 at 5:25 AM Vittorio Bertola <
vittorio.bertola@open-xchange.com> wrote:

>
> 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).
>

Thanks Vittorio - I didn't mean to convey that this was "my" idea, it's
meant as bits and pieces of lots of ideas I've been exposed to (including
from Cory). Indeed, I don't imagine using this exercise as a means of
challenging privacy problems with the platform - that is a challenge for
separate, and mostly regulatory, discussions. It's also orthogonal at best
to the consolidation challenge; from my perspective, I believe
interoperability fundamentally helps bootstrap competing services by
encouraging multihoming. Adding a further degree of orthogonality, the
specific notion of a third-party recommender system is orthogonal also to
this and in my mind primarily addresses the problem of a lack of agency
with respect to existing platforms (rather than challenging their
dominance). I would fully accept if the collective sentiment of the group
is to focus on a different problem; my suggestion is that we can find the
most collective impact through something like this proposal, given that it
isn't inherently dependent on changes to law/regulation, but nevertheless
intersects well with those efforts.


>
> 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.
>

It's true that full benefits of this proposal wouldn't be realized without
greater access to APIs/data/etc at major platforms. The theory of change in
my mind is to develop this as a way of working through the specific
challenges and opportunities arising from more interoperability, which
helps inform lawmakers as they continue developing their proposals; thus, I
think it is better to work out in front of such changes. Hope that makes
sense! While I don't mean to say that the problem of designing
interconnection mechanisms for third-party recsys is in any way more
important or more impactful than the problem of achieving greater
interoperability, I do believe that a W3C CG is better designed to address
the former than the latter, as collective political advocacy is ... tricky,
let's just say :-)

Cheers,
Chris