Robert Reich has an op-ed piece in the NY Times today arguing that “Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful” and that we should apply anti-trust regulation. There is little doubt that network effects have made tech’s new incumbents such as Google and Facebook formidable. But applying traditional antitrust approaches is the wrong idea. We want the social benefits of large networks, but we also want them to be somewhat less powerful and put some of that power back in the hands of individuals. The way to do that is to have the equivalent of Ad-Blocking for mobile applications!
There are many people decrying ad-blocking as undermining journalism and dooming the independent web. That’s a deeply pessimistic view for which I want to substitute a positive one.
In the early days the web was full of ad-free content published by individuals. It was individuals who first populated the web with content long before institutions joined in. When the institutions joined, they brought with them their offline business models, including paid subscriptions and of course advertising. Along with the emergence of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter this resulted in a centralization of the web. More and more content was produced either on a platform or by traditional publishers.
But there is something different about the web. Its underlying standard, HTTP, allows for the existence of a user-agent commonly known as a web browser. The beauty of a browser is that it can truly represent its user. If I don’t want to see ads I can instruct my browser to strip them out *before* displaying the content to me. Similarly, I can instruct it to fill forms for me. To keep copies of the data I submit. And so on. It is code that I, the enduser, control.
Ad-blocking is an assertion of power by the enduser and that is a good thing in all respects. Just as a judge recently found that taxi companies have no special right to see their business model protected, neither do ad-supported publishers. And while in the short term this will mean publishers fleeing to apps (more about that in a second), in the long run it will mean more growth for content that is crowdfunded and/or micropayed, freely shareable and published using open formats. Put differently rather than being the end of the open web, ad-blocking is really the beginning of its renaissance!
And that also points the way towards curtailing the centralizing power of network effects more generally: shift power to the endusers by allowing them to have user agents for mobile apps. I have been calling this for some time the “right to be represented by a bot.” The reason users don’t wield the same power on mobile is that native apps relegate us endusers once again to interacting with services just using our eyes, ears, brain and fingers. No code can execute on our behalf while the centralized providers use hundreds of thousands of servers and millions of lines of code.
How could this be accomplished? Every app talks to API endpoints that the service provider has created. Those same endpoints should be available programmatically. While that’s easily stated it is more difficult to see what an initial regulatory step might look like. My suggestion is to roll back any and all legislation that stands in the way of decompiling the code that runs on my device (any computer I own) and extracting keys from it. If this were legal, then it would be possible for third parties to develop user agents.
Such a mobile user-agent could then once again do things such as strip ads, keep copies of my responses to services, let me participate simultaneously in multiple services (and bridge those services for me), and so on. The way to help endusers is not to have government smash big tech companies, but rather for government to empower individuals to have code that executes on their behalf.
