Thread · 12 tweets · 21 Apr 2021

Are you ready for some internet governance? "Of course we're ready," I hear you say. "We thought you'd never get to it!" This thread includes: a W3C group you didn't know exists, the future of the Web, the business model of news, and a bit about the platforms. All at once!🧵

The @w3c is reinventing itself: • changing its underlying legal entity, • preparing for existence after inventor-founder-director @timberners_lee steps down, and • figuring out what it means to shepherd the Web when technology isn't neutral and things aren't going so great.

The group driving this work is a great bunch of folks known as the "W3C Advisory Board" (@W3CAB), many of whom have been trying to make things less bad for years. They've started putting together some "vision" ideas over at github.com/WebStandardsFu…. They want help and input!

(Important note: AB members are expected to represent themselves rather than their employers and they generally take that to heart. In keeping with that, I only represent myself when working with them, and I recommend you do too.)

One topic that the @W3CAB has struggled with is helping the Web be a healthy information ecosystem & not a massive vehicle for fake news and radicalising rabbit holes. It's a good thought, but no one wants standards nerds defining "truth", let alone engineering its enforcement.

My proposal here is this: we shouldn't get anywhere near that; instead we should ensure that high-quality news sources can have a good revenue model. Maybe that won't be enough, but right now they can't so it seems worth a shot.

A simple view is that there are two valuable things that a publisher can develop: content, which draws readers, and knowledge of its audience, which draws advertisers. But both of those things the platforms will just help themselves to one way or another. It's not great.

It can be hard to run a business when people just take your work • Content: AMP, SXG, Apple News, Showcase… • Audience: pervasive tracking from ad infrastructure, SSO, the OS, in Chrome… There's just not that much left to monetise.

Being a publisher on the Web is a lot like trying to run a bodega and having Walmart restock by parking a truck outside and helping themselves directly from your shelves (because it's "more efficient" and they want to "help brick & mortar shops").

That thinking is very deeply ingrained — in my experience even in people who would like to make things better. Just look at FLoC: it's nothing but more of that. This is where shared principles can help, even if they aren't binding. They help explain the problem.

So here is my small personal contribution as a first stab to help the @W3CAB: Origin Sovereignty. It has some ancestry in the CNPI and @linamkhan's "Separation of Platform and Commerce". github.com/darobin/Vision…

You can join the discussion in this PR: github.com/WebStandardsFu…. Feedback is very much welcome — on any aspect! And, if you'd like to contribute, don't hesitate to do the same with your own suggestions to help make the Web work better.