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 offensivemajor football organisations 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, etc. 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 criticise the choices they make.

It is, for example, easy to criticise 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? On 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 for 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, a 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 executives!)—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 on 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.

Online advertising—the business model that made Big Tech’s fortune—is under attack. Legislators and regulators on various levels take stabs at the incumbent platforms, with competition or privacy motives. Around the corner is new European legislation such as the ePrivacy regulation and the Digital Services Act that may further restrict Silicon Valley’s profitable trade in our personal data. Yes, it is called advertising, but personalized ads are of course more like selling personal data, making sure the ad is seen by the potentially most profitable eyeballs. Surveillance and privacy violation are the foundation of freenomics, not a side effect. However, other problems may be greater still. (And there is an answer; read on!)

Disruptive innovation based on free/ad-based/surveillance economy business models is like the famous cartoon of the man sawing off the branch he sits on. Somebody has to buy the ads that fill the platforms’ bank accounts. As one industry after another is disrupted by those same platforms, other players must arrive to buy the ads. Perhaps new industries can fill the gap, but the problem with disruption remains. The advertising model may be time-limited for that reason.

A few years ago, I had the chance to talk to Professor Hal Varian, chief economist at Google and the architect of the AdWords auction system that provides such a big chunk of Google’s revenue from search ads. He offered a different reason why ads may not live forever: fatigue. Attention is scarce, and we want fewer ads rather than more. Then he said, “Google may move to paid services.” (Netopia has not received enough credit for this scoop, in my humble opinion!)

Regulation, disruption, fatigue… if ads are doomed, must we start paying for e-mail, storage, and image sharing? Not so fast, there is a better free. Pioneered by the games industry, the free-to-play, or freemium, model combines the best of both worlds. Most players play for free; some choose to pay for special features or in-game content. With no surveillance, the integrity of the supplier-customer relationship remains intact. Real money from actual consumers. The games industry is hugely successful, expected to grow from 150 billion dollars in 2019 to more than 250 billion in 2025, according to forecasts. There is little reason the freemium model could not be applied to other digital offers besides games.

The European policymakers may take note that the games industry is one of Europe’s few digital champions. Want to find the next digital business model? Look no further.

What if someone were to make a scale 3D-model of your city, in virtual reality? What if they were to invite certain people to interact with that model, adding a layer of perception that is only available to some? What if they sold ad space in there? The banners in your metro car replaced by other advertisers’ banners in the virtual version of that same metro car?

You guessed it, this is not one blogger’s pipedream, but the next moonshot from Silicon Valley: Facebook’s “Project Aria”. As of September, a number of Facebook employees wear a particular set of spectacles which record what they see, creating a virtual 3d-model. Unlike Google Glass, the point is not to deliver services to the wearer (at least not at this stage), but to map out the world. To create a model of the world that a machine can understand. Google Streetview on steroids. If the resolution of GPS-satellites is maybe one meter, and Google Streetview maybe one decimeter, Project Aria could be another order of magnitude higher resolution.

Once someone has that data, the opportunities are huge: self-driving cars? No need to train them in real traffic, run the simulation in the virtual city. Want to train an AI on mobility patterns? The data is there. Who could compete with that, short of collecting a similar data set? What a competitive advantage for Facebook.

Next, how about pivoting the tech, so that the wearers can also receive information? This is where the ad space in the metro cars come in. Plus scores of other potential services. Unlike previous failed attempts (yes, looking at you Google Glass), the service provider understands the wearer’s context because they have built a scale model of the world.

Virtual reality is at the moment more like virtual potential. There are some cool virtual reality games, some business applications and other promising ideas. But the break-through is yet to come. The biggest bottleneck is building the market, a critical mass of devices. Much like the smartphone break-through a decade ago, a good device launched by a company that understands the market could make it happen in a short time. Too soon to say that Oculus Quest 2 will be to VR what Iphone was to smartphones, but it is no coincidence that the company behind it is… Facebook. In August, Facebook caused an outrage among Oculus users when it announced that a Facebook account will be needed for future headsets.

This raises many questions: who will be able to compete with Facebook for the virtual space? Where does this put Europe – once again stuck between the rock that is the United States and the hard place that is China? Privacy, Schrems, Data Shield… who will own the VR-data and what are the consequences? Who will write the rules for the virtual world?

Also, this brings back to life a classic intellectual property battle: remember the panorama-debate? The light show on the Eiffel tower has artistic quality and is there for protected by intellectual property rules. Permission needed for broadcasts or recording for commercial purposes et cetera. Most people say “whatever” (this writer saw it more as a proxy for other intellectual property battles). But what about the virtual metro car and the banner ads? Or what about virtual banner ads on… let’s say La Louvre? Is that the exclusive domain of the provider of VR-services? Perhaps the panorama-debate was ahead of its time.