My last missive discussed the technical (and to a lesser degree, the social) arguments for a decentralised, federated approach to social media. <\/p>\n
It didn\u2019t entirely answer a kind of a big question: Why do we need it?<\/p>\n
In a word: Jurisdiction.<\/strong><\/p>\n There\u2019s no end in sight to Facebook\u2019s 14-year apology tour<\/a>, and following the announcement that they\u2019re going to take their ball and go home<\/a> unless Australian news media stop asking for a share of the pyre\u2014er, pie\u2014it\u2019s abundantly clear that something has to happen. <\/p>\n In a conveniently (but not deliberately) timed piece of news<\/a>, Facebook has shown that it\u2019s willing to take steps to control malicious activity, especially when it comes to state-to-state mis\/disinformation<\/a> operations. Their globe-bestriding status makes it possible for them to analyse and avoid these abuses.<\/p>\n But reach is exactly why their platform is being used for these ops. And lord knows they\u2019ve been effective. Carole Cadwalladr\u2019s expos\u00e9 of Cambridge Analytica makes it abundantly clear that the platform is a near-ideal factory for weapons-grade propaganda. <\/p>\n I\u2019m counting the hours before the folks at Facebook begin to leverage that power to dig themselves like a tick into our digital landscape. The only thing that keeps them from doing it right now is potential loss of trust among their audience, and the fear that acting in one nation\u2019s favour might prejudice their relationship with another. <\/p>\n In short, they\u2019re still trying to have their cake and eat it too. <\/p>\n Australia\u2019s decision to foist regulation on the company upsets that delicate balance. Now, they have to decide. Publicly at least, Josh Frydenberg has stated that his government won\u2019t respond to Facebook\u2019s extortionate plan to simply turn off all Australian news. <\/p>\n But I expect that if there isn\u2019t a strategic national interest conversation going on right now between the platform and the state, there will be. It\u2019s also highly likely that Facebook will realise that Rupert Murdoch is their adversary, and the Australian Government is simply the hatchet man.<\/p>\n Once it does, all bets are off. Can, as Willie Nelson so coyly put it, old age and treachery beat youth and skill? Not forever. And, I suspect, not this time.<\/p>\n But if Facebook continues to take an antagonistic stance, there will be blood. And they will be subjected to regulation. And it will lead inexorably to more. <\/p>\n AT&T survived its breakup. Microsoft survived the legal sanctions it was burdened with, as well as the commodification of its operating system and software. Despite a balls to the wall rear-guard action against free software, open protocols and interoperability in the nineties and early oughties, it\u2019s still ticking along just fine. <\/p>\n Google will survive as well, because it can argue much more convincingly for the good it does. With a lower evil index, it presents a smaller attack surface for its adversaries. And frankly, it could drop Google News tomorrow and remain the company everyone thinks it is.<\/p>\n But Facebook is a different kettle of fish. Along with its liberating and democratising influence, it brings the potential to quite literally overturn societies, inflict immense damage on personal lives, and oust regimes. <\/p>\n They\u2019re doomed by their own dominance, and damned by their own tacit admission in their threats against Australian media that they actually have market dominance. The one defence a monopoly has is not to abuse that position, and that was the first card they threw away. <\/p>\n That\u2019s why, no matter what play they choose, they\u2019re going to find themselves coping with the perils of interacting with\u2014and accepting liability in\u2014all of the world\u2019s jurisdictions. <\/p>\n It won\u2019t all happen tomorrow, and it won\u2019t all happen because of this stoush with Murdoch. But it will happen. <\/p>\n So if they\u2019re smart, they\u2019ll hive off the risky part, the one the plays an editorial role. They\u2019ll either fragment themselves into a federation of national operations (more or less like every multinational that deals in physical goods), or if they\u2019re really smart, they\u2019ll open up their platform on a pay-for-play basis, and allow other companies to cling remora-like to their data corpus.<\/p>\n That makes for more modest profits, but it wins those profits with next to no accountability. <\/p>\n This is a terrible outcome for some people, of course. The moment you force an information service to work within the constraints of an authoritarian environment, you place people at risk. <\/p>\n The trade-off here is that people would only be at risk from their own authoritarians, and not their strategic rivals and adversaries. <\/p>\n People call this balkanisation. I get it. I don\u2019t like it either, but commercialised and commoditised access to Facebook\u2019s user base is really the only way we preserve anything of worth for a great many people. The stakes are high, and sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. <\/p>\n And that\u2019s why decentralisation and federation are a good idea for Facebook today. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My last missive discussed the technical (and to a lesser degree, the social) arguments for a decentralised, federated approach to social media. It didn\u2019t entirely answer a kind of a big question: Why do we need it? In a word: Jurisdiction. There\u2019s no end in sight to Facebook\u2019s 14-year apology tour, and following the announcement […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/village-explainer.kabisan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}