There’s been some more noise among web writers and bloggers about the threats faced by the open web1. Chris Dixon likes to imagine there’s a pendulum of fortune that swings back and forth between favoring open and closed systems, but Ev Williams is skeptical (as am I) that the pendulum swings freely in both directions; Cennydd says we will probably have to live with defeat, but Jeremy Keith expresses a “judicious hope” that openness will prevail.
At the end of his piece, Ev says “I’m intrigued to hear what, more specifically, would push things in the other direction.” I’m glad someone is finally asking that question! Because ‘judicious hope’ needs to be validated with specific courses of action. I have some ideas.
Here they are:
- Require some high percentage (I’d say 90%) of revenue from targeted online ad sales to be passed through to all end users who are seeing the ads. (Revenue from ads displayed to everyone without any personalization at all — like in a print publication — would not be subject to this.)
- Make it outright illegal under any conditions (even with consent) to sell users’ data (personal info, tracking, etc) without passing along 90% of the sale to those users. The sale of non-anonymized data should be illegal under any circumstances.
- Build direct micropayments into the web. Make direct payments as easy and expected on the open web as it is on walled content gardens like the App Store or Kindle store. Remove advertising from its high throne as the web’s default revenue route.
- For all businesses that allow the public use of their servers to store and communicate information, require them to offer users instant downloads of all their data in one of N approved formats, and to reserve for all their users a set percentage of nonvoting, non-dilutable stock options in the business.
The thinking behind these ideas will be filled in with a later supplement. But first, try your best to imagine what the internet would look like if they were implemented and enforced. How would they affect Facebook and Twitter? Online journalism? Blogging services? The entire Silicon Valley startup scene?
I’ll say up front that that these rules are designed to empower small, independent sites and to make certain kinds of huge online businesses unprofitable to run. If implemented, these rules would turn the business side of the web upside down. I seriously doubt, for example, whether Facebook or Twitter would ever have been become what they are now under this environment, or if they would find it possible to continue their businesses if we implemented it now.
They might be great ideas, or not, but they are concrete, suitable in scope to the actual problems, technically feasible, and based on certain first principles. I’d like to see people kick them around and build on them, or at least offer their own proposals (which no one besides Maciej Cegłowski has attempted as far as I can tell).
In all of these posts, we talk about the dangers of “centralization” and the threat of the “closed web” without really defining what we’re talking about. To some extent we need that shorthand because the threat is complex and has a lot of arms and legs; it would be tedious to go into that kind of detail every time. Maciej Cegłowski gave the most complete, historically aware, and eminently readable description of it in a presentation he gave in May 2014. Set aside a few minutes to read it.↩
Where are these proposals coming from? First of all, we need to recognize that the “open web” is not the only thing at stake here. Eleanor Saita famously said that all technical problems of sufficient scope or impact are actually political problems first. The change we’re all sensing on the open web is just a leading indicator of much broader changes to our whole lifestyle (ask yourself if this entirely plausible scenario is how you want to live) and the emergence of new forms of political power. Focusing on the nuts and bolts of the web itself, looking for technical solutions, is not going to be enough to counteract these broader trends. And as I’ve said before, simply appealing to people to change their personal habits of internet usage is insufficient and ineffective. What is needed is a principled re-adjustment of the entire playing field — a political solution to a political problem.
Now as to the principles that inform the particular adjustments I’m kicking around here: my thought is that we can vastly improve the internet’s role in our culture by legally recognizing the inherent worth of individuals’ identitities (information about who they are and what they do) as well as the worth of everything they create and contribute — every photo, every forum post or status update — to the creator, even if to no one else. These two kinds of things should be treated as the inalienable property of each individual no matter whose servers they are sitting on.
Pass spying revenues along to the targets
The first two proposals are pretty similar. They strongly disincentivize sales of targeted ads and personal information. To be honest I don’t know if, in practice, these proposals would kill those practices outright, or if businesses would still find a way to make them work. But the outcome in either case would, I think, be better for everyone than the status quo.
Targeted ad sales involve a website spying on people to decide which ads to show them. This is creepy and, in the long term, bad for society and for business — and also much more lucrative than the old way of displaying the same ad to anyone who happens to walk by. But supposing people freely choose to let themselves be spied upon, as is their right, we should require that they be paid, in money, a cut of the proceeds, no matter what.
Old fashioned non-targeted ads don’t involve spying, so we’ll leave them be.
Note that I’ve specified revenue here and not profit. The users’ cut for being spied on is a cost of goods sold, thus priced directly into what the advertisers are paying for the ads and not subject to a large subset of possible egregious accounting gimmicks.
How would this work administratively and technically? Whenever a person sees a targeted ad, they already have some sort of explicit relationship with the company that served the ad. For example, AdWords serves me ads based on information it knows about me: my search history, my browsing history, my emails, etc. Google knows it was me that saw the ad, otherwise it wouldn’t be able to target the ad. Under this arrangement, then, Google will have to give me 90% of the proceeds. They would have to collect a minimum amount of info from everyone who opts into seeing targeted ads — an address, or optionally bank account info — and send out checks or direct deposits every so often.
No more targeted ads
One very probable outcome is that the market for targeted ads would completely dry up under these conditions. Pay-per-click would no longer be feasible for targeted ads (people could earn themselves money by just clicking on ads all day long), and even paying by impressions would be too expensive for the probable return. The market would, in any case, find some new equilibrium; and even if that equilibrium means targeted ads are still being sold, the new arrangement will force everyone to recognize that it is the people who are doing the businesses a service and a favour by allowing themselves to be followed around and spied upon.
The market for online ads would likely shift back toward non-targeted ads. For example, we can suppose a simplified version of Adwords that would not be affected, by serving ads based solely on information freely available at the point of display — search keywords or approximate geographic location — and not on the viewers’ search history or other personal information.
The end of ‘investor storytime’ and corporate silos
The end of the targeted ads, along with a new universally-available revenue stream that doesn’t involve ads at all (micropayments, more on that to follow below), would probably in turn be the death of most centralized, siloed platforms who would no longer be able to subsidize the high costs of hosting petabytes of people’s data, or to justify it to investors.
This is pretty similar to the rule above. Information about who people are and what they’re doing should be ridiculously expensive to rent, and if at that price people are still selling it then most of the proceeds should go to the people who supplied it in the first place.
— Joel (Author) ·
Micropayments
‘Micropayments’ refers to small payments — payments as small as, say, $0.001. You might be thinking that’s too small to be useful, but today people will sign up for AdSense in hopes of getting perhaps that amount per page view (e.g, a small site getting 10,000 pageviews a month, with an ad click-through rate of 0.20% at $0.70 per click would see maybe $0.0014 per page view). Probably most content on the web would remain free, but people could also set a small price on some resources. Say, $0.01 to access an RSS feed, or to read a particular article.
You should read the link (and its links) for all the reasoning behind this. But essentially the web needs a universal, baked-in way to give creators the same revenue per-pageview they’re getting from advertisers, without making them get it from advertisers. The other ideas about penalizing targeted ads hardly make sense without implementing micropayments as well. If the market for the written word is going to be healthy, it’s not enough to discourage its actors from using ad sales as arbitrage; they need an obvious and reliable way to do direct trades.
The other proposals would require votes in Congress, but this is something we can begin designing and implementing now. It’s almost totally a technology problem. It will be very hard to do properly [Update, I'm working on one possible feasible approach.]. But it is a goal that is worthy of the web’s promise, in the same way that the years-long campaign for web standards in the early 2000s was worthy of the web’s promise.
— Joel (Author) ·