“But… if we don’t do it, somebody else will” – ever heard that? It’s the worst excuse ever, but it can be used to justify anything – pushing drugs at the schoolyard, selling “dual use” surveillance tech to dictators and now, apparently, hosting child pornography. If we don’t do it, somebody else will. And it’s like 20% of our revenue … As famously sung by the Manic Street Preachers: “If you tolerate this your children will be next” (citing Aneurin Bevan, founder of the British National Health Service). Except in this case, that bridge has already been crossed: sacrificing children for 20% of revenue.

The case in point is Dutch internet hosting provider NForce which hosts 93% of child abuse material in the Netherlands, according to sources to NRC. Operations director Dave Bakvis commented that it is difficult to monitor everything, most content is legal, there is sometimes over-blocking… and if we don’t do it, somebody else will. If this sounds like you’ve heard it all before, it’s because you have. This is a throwback to the debates around ISP liability last decade.

Illegal content has always been an unwelcome topic for digital infrastructure companies but child abuse material has been the exception, so controversial even some of the most hard-headed internet freedom fighters have accepted action is necessary (you could say other things than the consciences of broadband carriers board members should decide such things, but whaddayknow). So ISPs block access to such material based on lists provided from the police or NGOs. Keep in mind, this is about providing access, hosting is a different story: actually renting the server space, sending invoices to those who provide the abuse material. Difficult to pretend you know nothing if it shows up on your bank statement.

Internet companies love to compare themselves with things like road-keepers and post offices, to suggest they have nothing to do with the content or traffic (so does mr Bakvis). Those are horrible comparisons! While the road-keeper may have no idea who uses the road, there is no need for the police to get their support in order to uphold the law on the road. They just drive their police cars and set up a checkpoint and do whatever police do. Also, last time I looked cars have license plates which identify the owner. The post service has strict rules on what can be sent in the mail and a duty to act on suspicion. If the mail crosses a border, custom rules apply. If internet companies would act as road-keepers or the post, these problems would be solved.

Dear mr Bakvis. You can do better than this.

The Bank Holiday weekend in May is a big occasion in English football, but this year is different. Protesting against social media’s inaction toward racist abuse online, in a rare move the major football organisations in England come together in a four-day boycott. Contrary to many actions, this has a real price, the social media attention around football this weekend is worth mucho dinero, but English football decides it’s more important to take a unified stand against racism and demand action from those who own the platforms where it is distributed. The demands are straight-forward:

filtering, blocking and swift takedowns of offensive posts, an improved verification process and re-registration prevention, plus active assistance for law enforcement agencies to identify and prosecute originators of illegal content.

If this sounds familiar, it is not the first time anyone has brought demands that social media companies take responsibility for the negative impacts of the services they provide. The question is: who can make Big Tech step up? There are many candidates, but so far with limited success. Staff walk-outs have been tried, different flavours of government intervention, advertiser boycotts, share-holder protests, users departing… so far none of this has put more than a small dent in the stock price graphs of social media companies.

If users, owners, government, media, advertisers, or staff couldn’t influence Big Tech, perhaps footballers will?

Transparency: Premier League is one of Netopia’s supporters

Fungible – raise your hand if you had heard this word before the hype around NFTs – non-fungible tokens. I sure had not (I first thought it had something to do with mushrooms). It means exchangeable, as in it can be traded for something. Money is fungible. So non-fungible then means it is not exchangeable, but fixed. Which brings us to cryptoart, but first some de-tours.

I used to be rather enthusiastic about the opportunities brought by blockchain technology to enable “transfer not copy”. The internet is often described as a great copy machine, the drawback is that the scarcities that can make economic value are difficult to uphold. (See also the late David Bowie’s 2002-prediction of music as a utility.) However, Bitcoin and blockchain hasn’t really saved copyright yet, instead new challenges have arrived.

The biggest criticism is around energy use. Blockchains require massive amounts of electricity, Bitcoin alone on the same scale as The Netherlands. This is because of something called “proof-of-work”. Simplified: the number of blocks (or coins) on the chain are limited, new blocks are released every five or ten minutes and distributed in a sort of lottery. “Tickets” for this “lottery” are awarded based on proof-of-work; “mining” – the computer solving difficult math puzzles. As more miners mine, more electricity is needed to win the lottery. The value of the block can be thought of as the total price of the electricity put in by all miners. The electricity consumption is built into the proof-of-work system, and it keeps growing. (Longer read on the topic here.)

Never mind the climate, can crypto save art? The non-fungible token is – as the name suggests – a token: what is sold and bought is a token, not the artwork itself. A connection is needed between the token and the artwork. That connection relies on things other than technology: social contract, companies keeping records, the legal system. Rather than replacing copyright or creating a new market for art, the token is at best a piece of evidence that could be useful in claiming the right of ownership. It does not limit copying or re-distribution, thefts have happened, even re-distribution with the artist’s name (more here).

Other markets for digital items, such as assets in video games, have existed for a long time and are operated by for example games companies, without taking the detour around the blockchain. A convincing case why this is a better model has been made by Gamesindustry.biz.

It appears to this writer as non-fungible tokens are yet another example of the pipedream that technology will bring simple answers to difficult problems. If people want to trade NFTs, fine – trade away! The hype is there. Surely some will make some money. The business around crypto-currencies is booming, as represented for example by the IPO of crypto-trading-platform Coinbase this month. The impression is still however that more transaction is being done in Bitcoin than with Bitcoin.

So keep your crypto-powder dry, the old saying is still true: in a gold rush, you want to be selling shovels.

Many years ago at the Gothenburg book show, I was on stage with a representative from Wikipedia (technically the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikipedia). Oh, and before I write anything else, let me first say that I like Wikipedia. I use it. Lots of link to it on Netopia. Anyway, I asked the Wikipedia-lady what she thought about the legacy encyclopediae – don’t they bring some value that Wikipedia does not? Would it not be great with pluralism? (If you follow Netopia, you know this is the kind of questions I like to ask.)

“They must become much better”, she replied. The outdated business models of the print encyclopediae can’t compete with the free, crowd-sourced online alternative. The hierarchy model with academics scrutinizing entries in their fields of expertise has no place in the digital world. That is how I understood her. I wanted to say something like “wouldn’t it be better with both crowd-sourced and expert edited encyclopediae?” but I didn’t. My mind was busy unpacking her statement: it makes an assumption that the legacy encyclopediae could survive if only the tried a little harder. (And perhaps she was right, at least the classic Britannica lives on with subscriptions but many others are gone.)

Wikipedia continually asks users to make donations. It doesn’t say it uses some of those donations to pick fights in intellectual property law, on things like a monkey selfie and artist’s copyright. Of course it is fair for the Wikimedia foundation to bring whatever court cases it wants, but an organization committed to spreading unbiased knowledge could do better in being transparent about how it uses donations.

Did the donation economy win in the long run? Celebrating Wikipedia’s 20^th birthday earlier this year, Jonas F Ludvigsson – famous Swedish doctor – called for government intervention to secure Wikipedia’s long term survival. Funny, can it not just “become much better”?

It is a tad ironic that Wikipedia repeats the familiar patterns of disruption->monopoly, anti-establishment rhetoric and tax money bail-out. Similar to basic income, after all of the economy has been disrupted, let the government pay.

Happy belated birthday Wikipedia. Netopia wishes you many more years of crowd-sourced wisdom and promises to continue to link to your entries. Netopia also wishes you some competition. Pluralism wins in the long run.

EDIT: Looks like Wikimedia is not in dire straits after all. Rather it is swimming in $$$! Wikipedia Endowment: The Site Is Rich. Why Is It Fundraising? (dailydot.com)

Social media platforms are under fire on freedom of speech after they banned President Trump: Twitter, Facebook, Youtube… in fact an impressive number of internet services have followed suit Every Social Media Platform Donald Trump Is Banned From Using (So Far) | Glamour.

Social media are not just any business, they often function as the town square. Blocking users has wide consequences, which is part of the reason why the companies have hesitated. Is it censorship? No, censorship is when the government limits the freedom of expression of a citizen. Freedom of expression is not a duty for private companies to broadcast every expression. They are free to make the choices they like. However, the rest of us are also free to criticize the choices they make.

It is for example easy to criticize the tech companies double standards: Internet platforms are happy to monetise user content but not to take any form of responsibility for it, that falls strictly with the uploading user. Many cases exist, since long before President Trump, where internet platforms have interfered with content.

How can social media companies escape this trap? One the one hand, editing content would concede to taking some editorial responsibility. On the other hand, it is clear that bad actors can abuse the platforms if they don’t.

So far, the companies have decided themselves, often pointing to user agreement or opaque policy, perhaps dozens of pages with no indication of which specific part was violated. Or responding to demands of more action by saying it would “break the internet”, but sometimes promising to hire a few thousand more moderators.

That has not worked so well. The result is arbitrary decisions, lack of transparency and legal certainty. It looks more like the consciences of the top management or board members guide those decisions than anything legally solid.

Here’s the answer – and I have brought this idea before (read Netopia more closely, Big Tech execs!) – take a page from the media. Or advertising. Or cinema age ratings. Or games for that matter. Set up an independent oversight board. No, not the Facebook oversight board, that is not independent. It should be separate from any company. Make the rules transparent and easily accessible. Appoint media, tech and legal experts as decision-makers. Make all decisions public, that educates the entire sector as well as the outside world and creates a corpus that can be referenced in future cases. Appoint an appeals board, which can hear complaints from either side of the ruling. Fund the whole thing with fees from the participating companies. As an added advantage, this system can deal with different situations in different parts of the world (ask games how). The downside is that as any standard, this will put some limit to competition. It would be more difficult to paint oneself as “the ethical platform”. But that hasn’t really been the focus before, so why start now?

It’s not difficult. It’s called self-regulation. Happens all the time. Do it right.

Netopia has reported on how bad guys abuse domain names for Covid-scams. Not saying Oxford university reads Netopia, but it has come to very similar conclusions as the report we quoted. Here is a fresh press release from Oxford Internet Institute:

OII | Tech companies continue to provide online infrastructure for contentious Covid-19 websites even after flagging them as fake news, finds new Oxford study — Oxford Internet Institute

Listen to what professor Philip N Howard has to say.

“Google and Facebook may flag content for being problematic on their social media networks but are still providing fundamental infrastructure for that content and supporting the revenue streams that make the purveyors of such content financially viable.”

The problem is built into the business model of the internet platforms with no incentive for real change. Flagging fake news looks like the proverbial lipstick on a pig. We don’t regulate them, they regulate us.

How do we make real change? Can’t promise the full answer, but some ideas at the KYBC-seminar hosted by MEP Alex Agius Saliba in European Parliament next week. This writer will be the humble moderator. Don’t miss.

One of the oldest jokes about the internet is “On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog”, by cartoonist Peter Steiner, first published in the New Yorker magazine in 1993. While the opposite is also true – internet platforms know more about us than we do ourselves sometimes – it is still relevant today. Bad actors can be invisible behind intermediaries – hosting providers, advertiser networks, payment services and so on. Netopia’s cartoonist Rodrigo makes his own interpretation of the classic cartoon: Know Your Arms Dealer Customer

As Europe awaits the Digital Services Act, this conversation is bigger than ever: can European policy find a balance where bad actors can be held to account? By requiring such intermediaries to know who they deal with? Except, does that not risk falling into the other pit – violation of privacy? Is not the anonymity part of what makes the internet great? Well, that can be debated but a simple way to avoid it is to focus on business users. A business does not have human rights (those are exclusive to humans, duh!). Enter “know your business customer”. No risk of privacy violation because there is no privacy to violate in the first place.

How broad this topic is, can be demonstrated with the report on how the domain name system was abused in the corona-crisis. Fraudsters registered domains marketing non-existent covid-tests, vaccines or treatments, a blatant attempt to exploit people’s fears. Netopia interviewed Tom Galvin who wrote a report on the topic. He recommends a broad approach with regulatory action, law enforcement and education. In this context, an intermediary that may be less obvious is ICANN, the body that operates the domain name system.

What about the administrative burden? Would a system where various kinds of intermediaries have a duty to know about their business customers be an obstacle to innovation? Red tape for SMEs? Not necessarily, the burden is on the service provider and the EULAs are already like 27 pages in many cases. Maybe for new platforms, but all the other barriers to entry make this pale in comparison. May even be a business opportunity, competing with trust. Look at dating apps, they verify users in various ways in order to weed out “catfish” – no need for government intervention there, no breaking of the internet, just the demand for a trusted environment where one can… you know open one’s bleeding heart and hope for comfort.

Which brings me to the last point: in a perfect world, the internet platforms would take such precautions without pressure from the law-maker. Look at how the games industry provides age recommendations in the Pan-European Game Information-system. Or look at how the news media upholds it publishing standards via independent “Ombudsmen”. Never too late for Big Tech to step up and stop saying “it would break the internet”.

On the internet nobody knows you’re a dog. Unless you’re a business.

Nobody has explained Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act better than Wired Magazine’s editor in chief Nick Thompson the other day in a tweet:

Why does section 230 allow tech companies to moderate content? Bc the previous law was like one saying swimming pools were liable for drowning deaths if they had lifeguards, but not if they didn’t. The point of 230 is to fix those nuts incentives.

This was in response to news that Republicans seek to amend Section 230. In a parallel policy-development, which Netopia has commented on before, Big Tech is pushing to bring the liability immunity from CDA230 to European policy, for example in the Digital Services Act.

Now, Thompson’s tweet begs this question: Should we not worry more about the drownings than the liability? The take-away should not be no liability anywhere, but policy to minimize the drownings. Speaking metaphorically.

This is the blind spot for Big Tech, the failure to acknowledge that there are some actual problems that must be addressed, instead worrying about threats to “innovation” (=current business model) or “breaking the internet” (=Big Tech’s monopoly on regulation). The supposedly threatening policies are a consequence of Silicon Valley’s failure to deal with the fallout of its own business. Google says thai restaurants depend on its services to stay in business in the pandemic, while it fails to deal with disinformation campaigns – such as anti-vaccine – that also depend on those same services.

Clean up your swimming pool, Big Tech.