From disinformation to harassment to copyright infringement, the go-to policy response of the past two decades has been to make tech platforms responsible for policing and controlling their users.
What's more, deputizing giant companies to police their users has the perverse effect of making them more powerful by creating barriers to entry that clear the field of competitors who might offer superior alternatives for both users and business customers.
Take copyright enforcement: in 2019, the EU passed a rule requiring platforms to intercept and filter all their users' communications to screen out copyright infringement.
Very large platforms are every bit as capable of committing errors in judgment or making trade-offs that harm their users as small platforms.
The difference is that when very large platforms make even small errors, millions or even billions of users are in harm's way.
What's more, if users are trapped inside these platforms - by high switching costs, data lock-in, or digital rights management - they pay a steep price for seeking out superior alternatives.
In a market dominated by large firms who have locked in their users, investors are unwilling to fund those alternatives.
These smaller platforms are closer to their users, and stand a better chance of parsing out the fine-grained nuances in community moderation.
Giving users the choice of more, interoperable platforms that are less able to capture their regulators means that if a platform changes the rules in ways you dislike, you can go elsewhere, or simply revert those bad changes with a plugin that makes the system work better for you.
Interoperability From the Top Down and the Bottom Up. Since the earliest days of the internet, interoperability has been a key driver of technological self-determination for users.
That interoperability was attained through adherence to formal standards, but often interoperability was hacked into existing, dominant services by upstarts who used careful reverse-engineering, bots, scraping, and other adversarial interoperability techniques to let users leave or modify the products and services they relied on.
To make the internet better, policymakers need to make it easier for better services to operate, and for users to switch to those services.
Policymakers also need to protect users' privacy, labor, and consumer rights from abuse by today's giant services and the smaller services that will come next.
Dominant platforms, from Apple to Facebook to Google, point to the many times that they step in to protect their users from bad actors, but are conspicuously silent about the many times when their users come to harm when they are targeted by the companies who own the dominant platforms.
In Privacy Without Monopoly, we argue that it's possible for internet users to have the benefits of being protected by tech platforms, without the risks of being victimized by them.
To get the best of both worlds, governments must withdraw tech platforms' legal right to block interoperators, while simultaneously creating strong privacy protections for users.
Under this system, the final word on which privacy rights a platform's users are entitled to comes from democratically accountable lawmakers who legislate in public - not from shareholder-accountable executives who make policies behind locked boardroom doors.
The global resurgence of these long-dormant established antitrust actions is a welcome development, but at EFF, we think that interoperability, backstopped by privacy and other legal protections, offers a more immediate prospect of relief and protection for users.
That's why we've been so glad to see 2023's other developments, ones that aim to make it easier for users to leave Big Tech and go somewhere smaller and more responsive to their needs.
This rule explicitly takes away incumbents' power to block new market entrants in the name of protecting users' privacy.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Thu, 21 Dec 2023 16:58:04 +0000