World Wide Web

A good explainer:

In 2017, the body responsible for standardizing web browser technologies, W3C, introduced Encrypted Media Extensions (EME)—thus bringing with it the end of competitive indie web browsers.

No longer is it possible to build your own web browser capable of consuming some of the most popular content on the web. Websites like Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and others require copyright content protection which is only accessible through browser vendors who have license agreements with large corporations.

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These roadblocks were primarily introduced to appease the media industry.

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Since the introduction of EME to web standards, the ability for new browsers to compete has become restricted by gatekeepers, which goes against the promises of the platform.

The truth is many of the ills of today’s internet have a single thing in common: they are built on a system of corporate surveillance. Multiple companies, large and small, collect data about where we go, what we do, what we read, who we communicate with, and so on. They use this data in multiple ways and, if it suits their business model, may sell it to anyone who wants it—including law enforcement. Addressing this shared reality will better promote human rights and civil liberties, while simultaneously holding space for free expression, creativity, and innovation than many of the issue-specific bills we’ve seen over the past decade.

In other words, whatever online harms you want to alleviate, you can do it better, with a broader impact, if you do privacy first.

There are two clear, connected issues to address. The first is the extent of power concentration, which contradicts the decentralised spirit I originally envisioned. This has segmented the web, with a fight to keep users hooked on one platform to optimise profit through the passive observation of content. This exploitative business model is particularly grave in this year of elections that could unravel political turmoil. Compounding this issue is the second, the personal data market that has exploited people’s time and data with the creation of deep profiles that allow for targeted advertising and ultimately control over the information people are fed.

How has this happened? Leadership, hindered by a lack of diversity, has steered away from a tool for public good and one that is instead subject to capitalist forces resulting in monopolisation. Governance, which should correct for this, has failed to do so, with regulatory measures being outstripped by the rapid development of innovation, leading to a widening gap between technological advancements and effective oversight.

The future hinges on our ability to both reform the current system and create a new one that genuinely serves the best interests of humanity. To achieve this, we must break down data silos to encourage collaboration, create market conditions in which a diversity of options thrive to fuel creativity, and shift away from polarising content to an environment shaped by a diversity of voices and perspectives that nurture empathy and understanding.

When we started TinEye, we had a simple vision: help users search using images. Today, we are delivering image search solutions to a wide range of businesses where image search is mission critical.

Ours is a fast-moving industry. We measure our work in tickets, sprints, and projects. But that can make it hard to see the bigger picture sometimes. In this talk we’ll attempt to pull back and measure our progress in terms of decades. We might even attempt to gaze into the future…

Think of every enshittification as being preceded by an argument. Some people say, “We should extract this surplus: it will make our bosses happy, make our shareholders richer, and increase our bonuses.”

When the people on the other side of that argument said, “If we do what you suggest, it will be make our product worse and it will cost us more money than it will make us,” they tend to win the argument.

When all they can say is, “Yes, this will make us more money, but it will make the product worse,” they forever lose the argument.

The elimination of competition – and the ensu­ing capture of regulation – removed the discipline imposed by the fear of customers defecting as the product degraded. The harder it is for users to leave a service, the easier it is for the factions within a company to best their rivals in the debate over whether they should be allowed to make the service worse.

That’s what changed. That’s what’s different. Tech didn’t get worse because techies got worse. Tech got worse because the condition of the ex­ternal world made it easier for the worst techies to win arguments.

The timeline around a stable channel rollout is worded kind of strangely. The company says: "We expect it will take at least a month to observe and stabilize the changes in pre-stable before expanding the rollout to stable channel Chrome, where it will also gradually roll out over time. The exact timing may vary depending on the data collected, and during this time, we will keep you informed about our progress." It's unclear what "data" Google is concerned with. It's not the end of the world if an extension crashes—it turns off and stops working until the user reboots the extension. Maybe the company is concerned about how many people Google "Firefox" once their ad-blocker stops working.

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Google's sales pitch for Manifest V3 is that, by limiting extensions, the browser can be lighter on resources, and Google can protect your privacy from extension developers. With more limited tools, you'll be more exposed to the rest of the Internet, though, and a big part of the privacy-invasive Internet is Google. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called Google's description of Manifest V3 "Deceitful and Threatening" and said that it's "doubtful Mv3 will do much for security."

The great irony of the platformization of the internet is that platforms are intermediaries, and the original promise of the internet that got so many of us excited about it was disintermediation – getting rid of the middlemen that act as gatekeepers between community members, creators and audiences, buyers and sellers, etc.

The platformized internet is ripe for rent seeking: where the platform captures an ever-larger share of the value generated by its users, making the service worse for both, while lock-in stops people from looking elsewhere. Every sector of the modern economy is less competitive, thanks to monopolistic tactics like mergers and acquisitions and predatory pricing. But with tech, the options for making things worse are infinitely divisible, thanks to the flexibility of digital systems, which means that product managers can keep subdividing the Jenga blocks they are pulling out of the services we rely on.

The web is the means by which the acts of revisiting and recall of our collections, our programming and our institutional histories have become technically feasible, economically viable and with a reach and on a schedule that has literally never before been possible.

We would do well to recognize that. We would do well to understand the web not just as a notch in the linear progression of technological advancement but, in historical terms, as an unexpected gift with the ability to change the order of things; a gift that merits being protected, preserved and promoted both internally and externally.

The point is not that our relationship with technology should end with the web. The point is the web allows us to reframe our relationship with technology. Importantly, it enables – it does not guarantee, but it enables – us to reframe our relationship and dependence on the providers of those technologies.

The challenge of that relationship lies in the fact that as often as not the motivations of those providers and their platforms are not our own. Yet we continue to make an increasingly Faustian bargain to engage with them because we believe that these places are where our audiences have gone. Sooner or later that debt will come due so we would do well to recognize that the alternative, and a good alternative at that, is within our grasp.

In theory, the “free market” should reward publications that are doing important work. The more people care about a given issue the more they’ll read news stories about it, which should give publications covering it traffic and ad dollars. In reality, the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever.

The death of Jezebel under this set of circumstances is particularly cruel considering that voters overwhelmingly voted to enshrine abortion protections and against politicians who made the dehumanization of trans people one of their key policies.

“The closure of Jezebel also underscores fundamental flaws in the ad-supported media model where concerns about ‘brand safety’ limit monetizing content about the biggest, most important stories of the day—stories that create huge traffic because people read and share them,” Jezebel staff said in a statement from its union, the Writers Guild of America. “A well-run company would have moved away from an advertising model, but instead they are shuttering the brand entirely because of their strategic and commercial ineptitude. Jezebel was a good website.”