We’re in the middle of a perfect storm for rollback of the “open web” and burgeoning online surveillance
Looking at fallout of the KOSA hearings today — and subsequent commentary — I remain optimistic for the development of social technology & communication but I’m beginning to think the open web may basically “Do a Yahoo!” and fade, largely because of our self-appointed privacy, safety and national-security activists.
We are living at an unfortunate confluence of several movements in civil society and politics:
people who believe that online speech is directly comparable to physical harm
privacy activists who killed cookies to protect us from GAFAM “tracking” thereby wiping-out competition in advertising, imperilling small business, and encouraging some of the largest platforms (Chrome, iOS) to simply spy on us instead
failing and minor platforms which — given the death of cookies — may perceive the KnowYourCustomer™ elements of safety-demanded “age verification” as a potential parachute for their advertising revenue
political and legal activists who demand “data localism” because they believe that data protection hinges greatly upon lawyers having local CEOs and preventing seizure of servers, perhaps than it does upon preventing intrusion, scraping and hacking
security services, sitting in the middle of this hurricane, trying to make it whirl faster because making all internet activity attributable and trackable is food for their existence
We are in for a rough few years. There will be losses. The “app” ecosystem will likely take a big — possibly majority — chunk out of the “open web” as users demand features which are more easily built without the abstraction of traditional web/web-like services.
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