"To summarise, we are traversing an epochal change and we lack the institutional capacity to complete this transformation without imploding. (...) We can fix the failed state that is the Internet if we approach building tech with institutional principles, and an Internet that delivers on its cooperative promise of deeper, denser institutional capacity is what we need as a planetary civilisation." (#robinberjon)
#internet #complexity #transition #society
https://berjon.com/internet-transition/

"... whoever has more data, especially from more varied sources, will structurally tend to outcompete whoever has less. Because of this, broad sharing of data enables increased returns to scale and scope, leading to dominance, winner-take-all, and competition for the market rather than in the market."

#RobinBerjon, 2021

https://berjon.com/competition-privacy/

#privacy #competition #markets #data

"Given the fast-growing complexity of our digital lives, we are facing with high probability and inside of a few years the dystopia of a single company inserting itself as the broker for all of our transactions with third parties. As a community, we need to become systematic and unforgiving in hardening our architectures against capture and we need to do it proactively rather than reactively."

#RobinBerjon, 2022

https://berjon.com/capture-resistance/

#CaptureResistance

"The Internet-wide data free-for-all is key to the process of how some firms rose to dominance. This includes access to information about other businesses’ internal operation that platform infrastructure can observe, network effects in the valuation of data that make bigger players win systematically, or the conquest of adjacent data-rich markets through predatory pricing powered by universal identifiers and lack of purpose limitations."

#RobinBerjon, 2022

https://berjon.com/principled-privacy/

#privacy

"The [W3C's] membership-based governance model that prevails today (and its accountability shortcomings) actively prevents other sources of financing. Why help fund an organisation that looks like it will serve its members first and Big Tech first amongst those? No matter how much the individual representatives of those companies might sincerely seek to be independent from their employers, if that independence is not guaranteed by the process... it’s a pinky promise."

#RobinBerjon, 2022

#W3C

"It’s important to note that preventing the concentration of power is not about (architectural) decentralisation. Architectural decentralisation can certainly help, but it isn’t enough: as explained in Capture Resistance, linking on the Web is technically decentralised, but that was not enough to protect the Web from being centralised by Google. What matters here is the active checks and balances on excessive power."

#RobinBerjon, 2022

#decentralisation

"I remember a time... when the W3C was indeed a member organisation — but you can’t work for the Web if you don’t work with the Web. Over the years, the W3C community layered fix atop fix to progressively address the vexations and limitations of being a member organisation. Three decades in, the W3C looks a lot more like a public interest organisation financed by a generous group of donors who call themselves 'members'."

#RobinBerjon, 2022

https://berjon.com/w3c-governance/

#W3C #WWW #standards

https://berjon.com/internet-transition/
Robin Berjon on the future of governance...

“the Internet is largely a failed state with much infrastructure at the whims of gangs and their billionaire warlords ... anticooperative dynamics prevent collective intelligence”

#robinBerjon #future #governance #internet #fixingThePlanet #sociopolitics #politicalScience #daffodilPetals