Saving News From Big Tech

Big Tech steals from news, but it doesn't steal *content* - it steals *money*. In my @EFF series "Saving News From Big Tech," I show how #AdTech and #AppStore monopolies yield vast transfers from news to tech, starving newsrooms and gutting reporting:https://t.co/3rpe43oy8r

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on https://t.co/iSBh8srvly, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:https://t.co/ujl6uMiBev

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Now we've published the final part, describing how social media platforms hold audiences hostage, charging media companies to reach the subscribers who asked to see what they have to say.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

And, as with the previous installments, we set out a proposal for forcing tech companies to end this practice, putting more money in the pockets of news producers:https://t.co/l3OLJpNIrF

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

The issue here is final stage of the #enshittification cycle: first, platforms offer good deals and even subsidies to lure in end users.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Then, once the users are locked in, platforms offer similarly good deals to business users (in this case, publishers, but see also Uber drivers, Amazon sellers, YouTube performers, etc) to lure them in. Once *they're* locked in, the platform flips the script.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

It withdraws subsidies from both end users and business customers (e.g. news readers and news publishers) and forces both groups to pay to continue to transact with each other.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

In the case of news and Big Tech, that process goes like this. First a platform like #Facebook offers users a surveillance-free alternative to #MySpace, with a simple deal: tell us who matters to you on this site, and we'll show you what they post:https://t.co/BOQ8Cd9XWk

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Users pile in and lock themselves in, through the "#CollectiveActionProblem" - the difficulty of convincing all your friends to leave, and to agree on where to go:https://t.co/AExLifuKpj

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Then Facebook turns on the surveillance they promised they'd never engage in, and also begins to promise media companies that it will nonsensually cram their posts down readers' eyeballs, luring in both advertisers and publishers.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Users don't like their diluted feeds, or the surveillance, or the ads, but they like each other, and the collective action problem keeps them from leaving.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

As publishers and advertisers grow increasingly dependent on Facebook, Facebook makes the deal worse for both. Ad prices go up, as does ad-fraud, meaning advertisers pay ever more for ads that are ever less likely to be shown to a user.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Publishers' "reach" is curtailed unless they put ever-larger excerpts onto Facebook, until they eventually must publish whole articles verbatim on the platform, making it a substitute for their web presence, rather than a funnel to drive traffic to their own sites.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Facebook caps this off by downranking any post that includes a link to the public web, forcing publishers into the conspiracy to make "Facebook" synonymous with "the internet."

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Then, in end-stage enshittification, publishers' reach is curtailed altogether. They are told - either explicitly or implicitly - that they have to pay to "boost" their material to reach the subscribers who asked to see it.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

With social media ransom, tech finds a way to steal money from publishers no matter how they make that money. Tech monopolists command 51% of ever ad dollar. Tech monopolists rake off 30% of every in-app subscription dollar.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

And social media companies demand #danegeld ("verification," "boosting," etc) from publishers who want to reach the audiences that asked to see their materials.

This isn't just bad for publishers, it's also bad for audiences.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

You joined the platform to see the feeds you subscribed to, but the platform replaces more and more of your feed with ads and content from randos who pay to "boost" at the expense of the friends, communities and publishers you asked to see:https://t.co/HsaVZVuamY

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

What can we do about this? The answer lies in the founding ethic of the internet itself: the #EndToEnd principle.

Before the internet, telecommunications were controlled by centralized phone companies.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

If you wanted to reach someone else, you needed to connect to a centralized switching center, which decided whether to connect you, and if so, what to charge you.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

The internet, by contrast, operates on the "end-to-end principle": the job of the network is to transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers, as efficiently and reliably as possible.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

One expression of end-to-end is #NetworkNeutrality, the idea that carriers shouldn't be allowed to slow down the data you request unless the service you're trying to use pays for "premium carriage."

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Social media has run the internet transitions in reverse. They started off as end-to-end, neutral platforms. You created an account, told them which data you wanted, and they put it in a feed for you.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Then, as they enshittified, they turned into miniature Ma Bells. You don't get the data you requested, you get the data that someone is willing to pay to show you.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

This means that publishers - including news publisher - have to pay ever-larger shares of their revenues to reach the people who asked to hear from them, and those people see an ever smaller proportion of the things they asked to see in their feeds.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

The solution to this is to enshrine "end-to-end" delivery for social media: to make social media platforms' first duty to deliver data from willing senders to willing recipients, as efficiently and reliably as possible:https://t.co/AhvYJgfB5S

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

As a policy, end-to-end has a lot going for it. First, it is easy to administer. If you want to find out if a company is reliably delivering posts from willing senders to willing receivers, you can easily verify it by creating accounts and performing experiments.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Compare this to more complicated policies, like "platforms must not permit harassment on their services." To administer that policy, you need to agree on a definition of harassment and agree on whether a specific user's conduct rises to the level of harassment.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

And then you must investigate whether the platform took reasonable steps to prevent it.

These fact-intensive questions are the enemy of effective enforcement.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Bad actors can (and do) exploit definitional ambiguity to engage in conduct that *almost* rises to the level of harassment, and which is *experienced* as harassment, but which doesn't qualify as harassment:https://t.co/UFSRMhAiOs

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Then there's the problem of figuring out whether platforms' failures to block harassment are reasonable or negligent, a question that can literally take *years* to resolve, and then only by deposing the engineers who build and maintain the systems involved.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

By contrast, detecting end-to-end violations is simple and clean, and has an easy remedy in the event that violations are detected: if a company doesn't deliver the messages it is supposed to deliver, a regulator or court can order it to do so.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Another important advantage of end-to-end: it's a *cheap* policy to comply with. Complicated platform regulations can have the perverse effect of being so expensive to comply with that only the largest - and worst, and most harmful - platforms can afford to follow the rule.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

That means that smaller platforms - including nonprofits, co-ops, and small businesses - are snuffed out by compliance costs, trapping users and business customers in giant, abusive walled gardens, forever:https://t.co/823qn1cCDO

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Imposing an end-to-end requirement on platforms would kill the practice of holding news publishers' audiences for ransom.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

What's more, it's a policy that would benefit both large and small publishers - unlike, say, a profit-sharing arrangement between Big Tech and the news, which delivers disproportionate benefits to the largest publishers.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

After all, those big outlets' owners are typically either billionaire dilettantes or #PrivateEquity looters. And, unlike profit-sharing arrangements, end-to-end continues to provide for publishers even if the tech companies crash and burn, or get broken up by regulators.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

We want our news to be adversaries and watchdogs for Big Tech, not its partners, with a shared stake in Big Tech's growth and profits.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

Now that the EFF "Saving the News" series is done, we're rounding up the whole thing into a PDF "white paper," suitable for emailing to your friends, elected representatives, and fellow news junkies.

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

That'll be up in a day or two, and I'll post here when it is. In the meantime, here are the five parts:

* Saving the News From Big Techhttps://t.co/3rpe43oy8r

* To Save the News, We Must Shatter Ad-Techhttps://t.co/wlkgemxHdR

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023

* To Save the News, We Must Ban Surveillance Advertisinghttps://t.co/FfzQJYPBRK

* To Save the News, We Must Open Up App Storeshttps://t.co/QQMa0gIpH4

* To Save the News, We Need an End-to-End Webhttps://t.co/l3OLJpNIrF

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— Cory Doctorow @pluralistic@mamot.fr Red Team Blues (@doctorow) June 13, 2023