Thread · 9 tweets · 31 Aug 2022

There is a trend in regulation to try to fix the excess value that tech captures by organising collective bargaining and compensatory payments. Real problem, wrong solution. I agree with Daphne's summary and some (but not all) of Mike's points. Some notes: 🧵

To get this out of the way, the capture is real. Digital infrastructure (eg. search, ads) is privatised and heavily concentrated, the companies that own it use it to extract rent from smaller productive companies, and they don't have much innovation to show for it.

There has been solid work measuring the value that is captured, and it's significant. No debate there from me. The problem is: entrenching the system by layering payments on top of it isn't the best fix. Not everything is fungible! Structural fixes would be much better.

To stick to search and ads as examples, both are stuck in dated paradigms, neither has seen any useful innovation in a while, and yet we know that better is possible. We should be looking for ways to break the strangleholds that keep us mired there. Payment does the opposite.

A core issue is that these systems are infrastructure without governance. Jane Jacobs was right when she said: "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." That's the Internet we want.

I have zero sympathy for the "this is a link tax" wailing. That's a great argument if you live in 1998. But that ship sailed with AMP, {Google,FB,MSN,Apple} News, the mining of content for voice assistants, in-app browsers, timing attacks for first-party cookies…

I'm pretty sure that if you gave those companies a choice between "you *only* get to link with a bit of text and you don't pay" OR "you keep doing the stuff you're doing but you have to pay" they'll pick the latter. And that's the problem: it's only good to entrench incumbents!

What we should apply forms of collective bargaining over are the structural fabric of the digital economy. What rare exemptions are accepted for the reuse of other parties' data? What licensing terms are acceptable for content reuse beyond linking?

TL;DR instead of content-layer band-aids we should be working on infrastructural reform. The only value that I see in transferring some money is that it keeps the media on life support while we unfuck the Internet. I'd rather we moved faster instead.