Thread · 4 tweets · 30 Jan 2024

It's more complicated/subtle than that. If you're talking about irrigation in a village then yeah, you need to exclude or punish freeriders. For large-scale infrastructure commons, especially digital ones that have near zero marginal cost, that's a lot less important.

If you think about an open access road for instance, it doesn't matter that a lot of people who use it don't pay (maybe they don't meet a threshold for income tax, maybe they're tourists). The spillover benefits, including from nonpaying users, are worth it anyway.

For web infrastructure, we don't suffer from some developers not showing up to write standards. They're freeriding but we all benefit from the spillover benefits of them using the same infra. (It would also be tricky to run a WG with everyone.)

The shortcomings we have aren't from the lack of punishment as much as the lack of voice and ownership. At the end of the day, there is limited value in tending someone else's walled garden. (Whether you agree with the characterisation doesn't matter if people believe it anyway)