Corporate ownership of communities considered harmful.

[mdlbear]

This post by elements (found by way of this post on fandom_flies) talks about "the user as citizen":

This issue of ownership is much bigger than Six Apart and Livejournal, because it's really about how we as a culture construct the new class of relationships between citizens and businesses that is embodied by the interactive, hyper-connected social nodes that form the new structures through which modern humans are organizing our public lives.

I'd like to propose that any business entity that is primarily driven by and dependent on an active and content-generating user base be obligated to assign some share of real and actualized decision-making power to democratically chosen representatives of that user base. Obviously I don't expect to see this spring into being in law overnight, or even perhaps at all, and I'm not sure that would even be appropriate. But I would like to see businesses encode this principle into their very structures in such a way that we the users - we the citizens of the social web - can count on a certain measure of rights and due process, beyond what we are legally owed by a corporate entity.

That's one possibility, and it's certainly worth pursuing, but I don't think it's likely to work. Let me propose a few others. I think they all have their place, and it's an open question which is going to work better:

• User-owned services: This is the tried and tested model of credit unions, mutual insurance companies, and co-ops. One user, one vote, and everybody owns an equal share. If LJ had gone this route, and had stuck with paid and invited members, we wouldn't be in this mess.
• User-owned servers: This uses the even more tried and tested principle of "A Person's Home is their Castle." What's on my server at home, under a domain name that I own, is a lot harder to take away. ISPs and phone companies are under much stricter rules about when they can deny you service than are corporations that own their own servers and kindly let you put your content on them. The nice thing about this option is that it scales well -- exactly like the Web, in fact. Search engines and cooperative tag servers take the place of centralized databases, and even searching and tagging can, and should, eventually be decentralized.
• Anonymous peer-to-peer: This is the Freenet model. Your content is encrypted, and widely replicated. Anyone with the document ID and key, which you can publish widely as well, can retrieve it and decrypt it. With wide, random distribution it becomes practically impossible to find and delete every copy of something (though it may become hard to find a copy for a while). Something like this has the potential to go a long way toward fixing the current problems with both censorship and overly-restrictive copyright.

Ultimately I think we're going to have all four: a push toward user representation on corporate-owned services, user-owned co-operative services, federated private servers, and anonymous peer-to-peer networks. I'm directing my own efforts toward federated private servers and anonymous peer-to-peer because they're the best fit for my cynical, old, anarchistic hacker's soul. (And, I might add, a pretty good fit with what some of my coworkers are doing, which hopefully will be published soon.)

But if someone else wants to write a Community Member's Bill of Rights I'll be happy to sign it, and if somebody wants to build a user-owned co-op community I'd be delighted to buy a share.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

I'm with you. I hope all four end up out there; the competition will keep everyone at least some semblance of honest.

I'm not up to the writing challenge of a Bill of Rights; I do much better reporting things than I do creating them. OTOH, I really really want to build a user-owned community; I just don't have the bandwidth to do it all myself. I've actually got the hardware, and a couple ideas for colo'ing it. I might even find the odd hour of time after Dandelion Fluff to hack on it. And I know someone else within your idea of walking distance that's interested in putting up a copy of the LJ code for a "regional" server (not sure how big that region would be); even if you end up not being able to be on that server, I can certainly pick her brains for lessons learned and help you out as best I can with rolling your own. And I could totally see donating Gemini (2x550MhZ PIII server) to the cause in exchange for a permanent account... I'd say it's not like I have anything better to do with it, but this is *exactly* the sort of freedom-enhancing effort I'd envisioned doing with it...

What I'd like to do ultimately if we can get a good deal is colo the box in this tornado-proof bunker out in Walla-Walla; my former boss' biggest customer has his data center out there, and I don't think he'd mind hosting such a radical thing as long as the bandwidth didn't get out of hand... I'd rather not colo it in Seattle if I can get away with it simply because (a) it's cheaper and (b) there's something about a datacenter in a building that can put the digitus impudicus to the worst Mother Nature can swing that kinda appeals to the Scotsman in me.... :)

[mdlbear]

Nice thing about co-ops -- people co-operate on them. Getting one off the ground is tough, though. I've thought of doing it before, but discovered I didn't have the organizational skills for it.

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

The big problem with this or any of the other solutions I've seen people propose is that it just shifts the responsibilities of interpreting law and regulations down the line to an even more less responsive and generally far more conservative level: the ISPs and the hosting companies.

They won't just take down individual users to protect their businesses - they'll pull the whole service/site. They're also a hell of a lot easier to manipulate...

...and it's a lot harder to move a site or a domain than it is to move an account from one service to another.

[mdlbear]

At least in the US, ISPs have notification requirements, at least for allegations of copyright infringement. They have to get a written takedown notice, then notify the site owner, and put the content back if the site owner protests the takedown, at which point it ends up in the legal system.

I've heard disturbing things about some domain registrars; that's been a big problem for a while now.

But in either case, if you're keeping your own data at home and pushing it up to one or more public servers, you have a much easier time moving it someplace else than if the data originates on some centralized service and you're only backing it up if the service gives you a suitable hook. Right now, any posts I make to LJ communities are entirely at their mercy unless I go back and screen-scrape the articles.

[mdlbear]

By the way: are you going to be in the Bay Area any time in the next week or two (or at ConChord next weekend in LA)? I have a CD for you.