Overall, there still seems to be great satisfaction with “the internet’s grand bargain: the exchange of free or subsidized content for personalized advertising,” as Larry Downes, project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy, writes in Harvard Business Review. And what would the internet look like if this bargain collapses due to new government data privacy regulation?
Some companies might have to find a new business model. More likely, the incumbents would be able to afford the legal overhead to comply with regulations, and new competitors would not.
If you had told me in 1994 that the Internet’s “grand bargain” would be about getting personalized advertising, I would not have been nearly so romantically taken with it. At that time, the grand bargain I was hoping for was to be able to achieve success based on taking initiative and using some technical skills instead of relying on the ability to dazzle a crowd or elbow rivals out of the way playing office politics in big organizations.
The technical architecture of the Internet put intelligence at the edges, not in the center. The social architecture would work similarly.
But that vision for the social architecture seems to me to be far from reality. Since about 2000, the intelligence at the edges has gone down, as Internet usage spread to the masses. And the intelligence at the center went up, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and the ability to manipulate large datasets.
I side with Stallman on that: http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/04/richard-stallman-rms-on-privacy-data-and-free-software.html
The bargain is not good for an individual.
I would argue, by design, the social architecture *does* put intelligence at the edges. Namely the people, ideas, & discourse one finds on the edges of the internet are vastly superior to what one finds in the ‘center’, i.e. content on the blogosphere & within certain communities is >>> what you’ll ever find on your facebook newsfeed. The ‘center’ of the internet tends to play to the LCD, and thus is ‘dumb’ in some real social sense.
“If you had told me in 1994 that the Internet’s “grand bargain” would be about getting personalized advertising, I would not have been nearly so romantically taken with it. At that time, the grand bargain I was hoping for was to be able to achieve success based on taking initiative and using some technical skills instead of relying on the ability to dazzle a crowd or elbow rivals out of the way playing office politics in big organizations.”
Both grand bargains exist today; they are not mutually exclusive. The web, much like the world, is choose-your-own-adventure. The internet HAS enabled success based on initiative unlike any technology ever before. Related: https://twitter.com/vgr/status/987566959846768640. You can spend your time in the dumb center, or on the mind-blowing edges.
Is saying “Look at what’s happening in China?” a counterargument against the great satisfaction? Or is that too simplistic?
The internet HAS enabled success based on initiative unlike any technology ever before. – That’s also Peter Thiel’s argument for these platforms. If you can build a career on top of YouTube then you won’t find it evil.
The worst regulatory confusion comes from ‘know your customer’ banking and personal privacy rules. That collision results in a potentially huge and sudden distortion in finance, The barbarians get with personal privacy tech, but adapt it to liquid swap net. Sudden crowded exits from the CB to cover opportunities in alternative monetary systems. Solution is for CB to jump in, both feet, and support a tech called pre qualified, a credit system with free entry and exit such that all KNC rules are met apriori, and trading is not clogged.
The consumer surplus findings suggest that taxation authorities are missing an opportunity. The tax base could be expanded and significant revenues raised with, for example, a $10 federal excise tax on social media, email, and other e-commerce accounts.