Competition, Civil Liberties, and the Internet Giants

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: June 30, 2018 at 22:31:58 GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Competition, Civil Liberties, and the Internet Giants
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Competition, Civil Liberties, and the Internet Giants
> By MITCH STOLTZ, CORYNNE MCSHERRY, CINDY COHN, AND DANNY O’BRIEN
> Jun 27 2018
> <https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/06/competition-civil-liberties-and-internet-giants>
>
> The power of the Internet historically arose from its edges: innovation, growth, and freedom came from its users and 
> their contributions, rather than from some centrally controlled core of overseers. But today, for an increasing 
> number of users, there is a powerful center to the net—and a potentially uncompetitive and unrepresentative center at 
> that.
>
> The whole Internet itself is still vast and complex, enabling billions of users to communicate regardless of their 
> physical location. Billions of websites, apps, and nearly costless communications channels remain open to all. Yet 
> too many widely relied-upon functions are now controlled by a few giant companies. Worse, unlike previous technology 
> cycles, the dominance of these companies has proven to be sticky. It’s still easy and cheap to put up a website, 
> build an app, or organize a group of people online—but a few large corporations dominate the key resources needed to 
> do those things. That, in turn, gives those companies extraordinary power over speech, privacy, and innovation.
>
> Some Specifics
>
> Google and Facebook dominate the tools of information discovery and the advertising networks that track users’ every 
> move across much of the Western world. Along with Apple, Microsoft, Twitter, and a few similar companies, they 
> moderate an enormous volume of human communication. This gives them extraordinary power to censor and to surveil.
>
> Amazon dominates online retail in the United States and back-end hosting across much of the globe, making it a 
> chokepoint for a broad range of other services and activities. A few credit card networks process most online 
> payments, giving them the power to starve any organization that relies on sales or donations. Even more 
> fundamentally, most people in the U.S. have little or no ability to choose which company will connect them to the 
> Internet in the first place. That gives a few broadband ISPs the power to block, throttle, and discriminate against 
> Internet users.
>
> Civil Liberties at Stake
>
> A lack of competition and choice impacts nearly every facet of Internet users’ civil liberties. When so much of our 
> interaction with friends, family, and broader social circles happens on Facebook, its arrangement and takedowns of 
> content matter. When so much search happens on Google, and so much video discovery on YouTube, their rankings of 
> results and recommendations matter. When Google, Facebook, and Amazon amass a huge trove of people’s communications 
> as well as data about purchases, physical movements, and Internet use, their privacy policies and practices matter. 
> When Comcast and AT&T are the only options for fixed broadband Internet access for millions of people, their 
> decisions to block, throttle or prioritize certain traffic matter.
>
> The influence of these companies is so great that their choices can impact our lives as much as any government’s. And 
> as Amazon’s recent sale of facial recognition technology to local police demonstrates, the distance between the big 
> tech companies and government is shrinking.
>
> Diverse Voices Need Diverse Options
>
> Careful action to bring a variety of options back in these important portions of the Internet could re-empower users. 
> Competition—combined with and fostered by meaningful interoperability and data portability—could let users vote with 
> their feet by leaving a platform or service that isn’t working for them and taking their data and connections to one 
> that does. That would encourage companies to work to keep their users rather than hold them hostage.
>
> More competition can also strengthen civil liberties. Innovators could develop alternative apps and platforms that 
> safeguard their users’ speech, protect their privacy, foster community, and promote constructive debate, confident 
> that those tools will have a level playing field to reach potential users. And those alternatives don’t have to be 
> commercial: decentralized, federated, or other co-operative solutions can put power back into the hands of their 
> users, giving them the ability to change and adapt tools.
>
> Increasing competition by itself won’t fix all of these problems. But it’s one of the few strategies that, if handled 
> correctly by courts and policymakers, has the promise of opening up space for innovation from the bottom up, driven 
> by individuals, small businesses, and communities with great ideas.
>
> The good news is some competition does exist. We have surveillance-free search by companies like DuckDuckGo and 
> Qwant, open source social media tools like Mastodon and Secure Scuttlebutt, independent services like Snapchat and 
> Yelp, and competitive ISPs like Sonic, just to name a few.  But many of these are under threat from the giants, and 
> many, many more options are needed.
>
> [snip]
>
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