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Data. Together. Let's read about it

Data Monopolies (May 12)

🎬 Recorded Call

Intro

Most of our data and information is controlled by a handful of companies. How did this come to be, what are examples of responsible and irresponsible holding of this power, and how do we imagine we might slip the trap of data monopolies?

Readings

Anti competitiveness, and how did we get here?

What are the things we worry about with monopolies?

Data Monopolies in a COVID era?

Optional bits to play around with for discussion:

Themes

  • Anti competitiveness, and how did we get here?
  • Anti trust in the EU/US
  • What are the things we worry about with monopolies?
  • Data Monopolies in a COVID era?
  • Can data monopolies be a force for good?
  • Monopoly vs centralization
  • Impact on freedom

Notes

  • Pure consumption vs what bads result from monopolies
  • Value of innovation: end in itself vs to the end of reduced consumer prices. What do we measure?
  • We care because we believe in some moral harm
  • The existence of antitrust laws is an admission that we don't think unbridled capitalism is a good
  • Failure to "price in" certain problems/existence of externalities
  • Bezos masterful on getting around current concept of monopoly
  • What exactly is a data monopoly?
  • Market position around data services around which an entity has full control
  • Role of open source?
  • This is not a pricing issue, this is a power issue. And how is that power leveraged?
  • Monopoly from what context? User context, regulatory context?
  • Is it a monopoly, or is it an economy of scale? E.g. apple has an economy of scale, they're hard to compete with but you can.
  • Monopoly: when an actor in a market uses position to diminish competition
  • In what contexts is a data reservoir a pure power aggregator which precludes the formation of alternatives
  • Data is a resource; the market is publicity
  • Economic framing perhaps unhelpful. Problem that matters the most is the holding of power that by nature continues to concentrate

Discussion

JONATHAN: Yeah, I mean, so just to maybe kind of take a step back as at least the themes that I think we sort of discussed prior—One of the things that I think was super interesting as we were trying to come up with ideas for how to organize this was trying to at least have some sort of grounding on, how did we get to where we are? In monopolies and anti-competitiveness, I think there are some interesting things that hopefully we can dive into in a second, about what is good and bad about a monopoly. And I think without having that grounding, it's hard to identify: what are the bad things that can come out of what we see today? Because I do think there is a version, and especially when we think about the modern application of, how do we treat things like a COVID response, coming up with, what are the things that we're trying to protect against? And where is like, their good and where's their bad? And also monopoly versus centralization? Are those two necessarily the same thing? These are kind of interesting points.

I think the genesis of this, as we were discussing, in preparation for the call, was trying to figure out how do we get some sort of basis so we can talk about, what are ways that—and I wouldn't even argue that the three listings that we have are comprehensive, they're just like how the EU and the US historically looked at monopolies and anti-competitive work. And whether those are even sufficient definitions is maybe an interesting opening place to start, but then try to dive into if those are at least necessary, some bounding conditions, are they sufficient for like all the scope of things? Because they focus in ambiguous– well, in some ways very specific, some more ambiguous, then trying to piece out: what are the things that we think we should address? What are the things that are potentially good/bad that can come from them? And then diving into: What are we seeing today? Because I think we have a really practical example that we could talk about.

So maybe starting at least at the beginning here with the anti-competitiveness thing. I'm not sure who was able to actually take a look or read. Is there someone who'd like to give a quick summary or high-level take from the readings? I can give my two cents: if I was to give my takeaways from the readings, how I see the differences between like EU and US and like how they think about the world.

My understanding—and people, correct me if I have walked away with a false one—is that the way that the US has historically approached antitrust has changed pretty significantly. I think it was Milton Friedman who proposed that the way that we should consider antitrust is from a very consumer-driven lens, where the primary argument ends up being around—and I think the actual history of this, which is not in a reading, there's some really interesting antitrust case that was brought against some supermarkets that got like 10% market share or something in some region, and there was an antitrust case brought against them. And then Milton Friedman wrote this whole thing that became very popular, which was like, if it's not hurting the consumer, then why do we care, which is basically like how the US thinks about the world.

Largely, I think the legislation that's been passed and the way that it's been pursued in courts, has been around price. And it's interesting because when we talk about consumer harm, we're talking about a specific lens of consumer harm. We're talking about it from this one kind of imperfect metric, did you pay too much or not? And I think that's an interesting contrast to the European definition.

There's functional differences in the law as well, where the European law is not written as specifically. I forgot which article, one of them talks about this where like the two key operative words inside of the EU legislation is "for example", where they say like, this should not hurt consumers, and for example, there's a number of things that are listed, but by saying, "for example", it gives the European courts a lot of flexibility when they define what has actually violated consumer need or what is disadvantaging consumers, and that's been pretty broadly interpreted to also include things that have been stifling competition or made it less useful. Not less useful for users, necessarily, but things that would prevent one group from having too much power.

So I think that's the high level grounding. I think both views of the world, the EU and the US, center on, we want to do things that are good for consumers. I think the definition of what "good" is, is, I think, where things are kind of fuzzy. And in the US and in the classic American forum, we think of it as the purely economic lens of the world, and not necessarily, what are the other externalities? Are we truly pricing in all the other forms of harm, whether it be fewer options, which is how the European courts have interpreted it, or does it mean to violations or potential violations of civil liberties? You can even look at other readings that were not included, like what are potential national security risks, if you think about it from, if one org has too much data, and Saudi Arabia, like they did with Twitter, pays a Twitter employee $300,000 to leak information, is that dangerous to me?

Sorry, that is going a little too far, I think, from a grounding perspective. I'd love to hear other people's reactions or thoughts.

KELSEY: That's a really great summary. The only thing that I would maybe pick on a little bit is, the US one definitely has this metric around price, versus the EU one—based on that New Yorker article, my impression was that, in both of them, the the intent was to not stifle innovation. The idea was that monopolies stifle innovation. But then it was kind of a question of, innovation to what end? And the American interpretation ended up being, innovation to the end of consumer protection, versus the EU take is maybe innovation as an end in itself. And sort of contrast that with, from the Goliath reading, there was that Brandeis quote, which is, "Anyone living under a monopoly, subject to the whim and caprice of a few self-appointed industrialists, is therefore not a free citizen," versus this concept, which is much more Friedman, that regulation of any kind is inherently bad and stifling to free democracy.

MATT: I mean, I think that there are these—well, the EU/US divide, to me, in some ways is, you know, it was useful to hear, but is like, for me, sort of uninteresting. I don't care what's been instantiated as law in different jurisdictions. I am interested in what models exist for describing: what are the ills that can result from monopolistic capitalism, or just from monopolies in general? And it seems to me that there are two main conceptions at work in the conversation so far. One is purely about consumption, and the other has been described here as innovation. But it seems to me it just has a broader conception of what bads result from monopolies. So these are really two different lenses. One is, is there an economic penalty that we pay for the existence of monopoly?; and the other is, is there some form of social good which is sacrificed when a monopoly comes into being? And that social good could be economic in a broad sense—so, it could involve innovation. Or it could have a less well-defined ill effect, a kind of moral effect, on how we live, how we think of ourselves, how we relate to one another in a society. As Brandeis says, it has some effect on on freedom, whatever that means.

It seems to me that, ultimately, this broader conception is the one that's interesting, right? Like, we wouldn't be all up in arms about the monopolies that Google and Apple exercise for the sake of $7 a month or, you know, $28 a year, like that. I just can't believe that that would, you know, get our boxers twisted in a knot. You know, I think it's the idea that there's some moral harm that comes to us as a result of living under a monopoly, and that's why we care.

BRENDAN: Yeah, I think you make a lot of really good points, Matt. The broader theme is the one that's interesting. But I think that the specifics of the of, as Kelsey pointed out in chat, this idea that having these two interpretations are really important. I think antitrust is a really interesting category of work, right? It's this very strange pressure release valve for, an otherwise balanced-seeming—to some—balanced capitalist equation, right? This idea that, you know, it all works hunky dory, it's fine. But like, again, this isn't necessarily my view. But in, in the traditional interpretation of society as a functioning working thing, you have this: capitalism is great, unbridled capitalism is a problem. Generally, we need some sort of referee. Right. And that's, I think, sort of where antitrust—the existence of antitrust as a category of thoughts, as a category of laws and enforcement, the existence of the regulation that derives from that—is all, it is an admission that there's a rounding error here. There's a thing that needs to be brought in to balance this this seemingly perfect equation.

And I think that it's really interesting to dive into, to quote Malcolm Gladwell's podcast, to descend into the particulars on this on this one and really see how it shakes out. I think the framing of "consumer good" that you see in the US is like Exhibit A of where a data monopoly—it is, as Jonathan said, a failure to price in certain problems, become really, like they sort of become a way to like carve around a lot of this.

If you read any of Jeff Bezos, his letters to his investors, .it's a magnum opus on antitrust, right? Like he's just, he's a masterful mind when it comes to designing something that evades the current understanding of antitrust in the world. And then, I think the EU's interpretation something has been far more broad, but also like I mean, he was continually accused of being nonspecific and the sort of like, big American engines that got the Googles and Apples of the world are very frustrated with the right down to like requiring the USBC ports, or USB mini, what did they settle on for charging phones? Yeah, I think there's like a really—and I think those particulars are really interesting, and they're a really interesting point for departure, because they get you back to the the big conversations really quickly. Because they're the result of a lot of thought, right, the results of someone trying to say, just reduce it down to this. A frequent characterization of consumer good or consumer benefit is—Milton Friedman had a lot of ideas that really didn't scale well, and this this might be one of them.

JONATHAN: I think one of the interesting points, just to build off what you were saying, that touches on the one specific example, and the what are things we worry about with monopolies, those two readings—basically, it's an interesting use case looking at the Getty and Google thing, where it's like, here is an example where there is a clear harm, maybe not to the direct consumer, but to the suppliers. Google is enabling the piracy, whether willfully or not, of a bunch of information. They're stealing ad revenue, too, from Getty, and that's causing material harm to all the people up that chain. And so of course the EU does what seems like the right thing and like enables getting you to actually pursue and win a case against Google, and yet that leads to "outrage" from people. And, there is a question. $7 a month is not a huge fee if that's what you were paying for Google services, but are we too cheap to even do it? Should it just be like a matter of, what is the choice and the optionality? I think about this a lot. With all the sites that have done GDPR stuff, they require you to acknowledge. We have gone from, you have no choice, to because you have so much choice, you will just on autopilot be like, Yep, okay, I just want to get to my site. I think there's a design question here. Can you even get away from it? Because if the volume of things that you need to end up doing in order to protect against some of these bad things is so high friction, people collapse under their weight.

KELSEY: Just from what you were talking about, and this diverges from the readings, so I guess everybody's welcome to bullshit on this, but what do we see as the role of open source in combating that gap between, well, we don't want to pay for stuff, but also we want stuff to be good and free and not a monopoly company?

BRENDAN: I think it's really dangerous. I think that burdening open source with filling some missing piece is so problematic. I think that that's the bad side of open source, this expectation that there's this untapped vast well of developer that is willing to fill the necessary gaps in our stack. It's just painful. And I think that the GDPR stuff really speaks to this. There's been how much ink spilled over the way that the regulations put out through GDPR places undue burden on small companies that are far less able to deal with this, and "oh, somebody will open source something". Yeah, but like you've said, it's a very frustrating thing. That is another issue in another queue. And another person, another burnt out developer somewhere, no thanks. That's another license change to somebody saying, we no longer can support the open source side of this. I think that's it. That's it. Yeah, that's my that's my rant.

KELSEY: I'm not saying it's a solution. I'm not saying that I mean, like, it doesn't work if all open source is done for free, but it doesn't have to be the same thing. Right? I'm a firm believer in the existence of some middle ground utopia where you can have open source and paid developers. It must exist.

PETER: So, the title here is data monopolies. Have we defined a data monopoly? Or is there a definition in the reading that we agree on?

MATT: Yeah, I think so far we've mostly been, I've been wanting to get to a data monopoly proper instead of just monopolistic activity more broadly. And somebody else should say what we really mean by data monopolies, since I haven't thought too much about it, but...

PETER: Can you give examples of what feels like a data monopoly to you?

MATT: So, one thing that that Jonathan was discussing was the geographical data sets owned by Google and Apple. "Monopoly" is maybe a little too strict a term, but these are non-competitive databases for two sets of users. And the possession of those datasets confers to the owners a set of privileges, that market position in two ecosystems— that's an advantage multiplier. They have these these market positions that are already well-entrenched, and the the construction of their services around data over which they and only they have control is a way of rendering permanent their market advantages.

So that's one way to think about that movement data. And then it's been interesting during COVID to watch them try to figure out how to deploy that data in something like the common good. And so that's sort of an example, Peter, and maybe Jonathan has something to say?

JONATHAN: I don't know if we actually ever formally defined it. I think the idea of a data monopoly, as I am currently defining it in my head, is taking the ideas of like, why do we refer to it as monopoly? And that's where we're usefully grounding ourselves in, how have we thought about what a monopoly is previously, and applying it to your specific context, which is: when we think about data, and exactly what you were describing, I actually linked to something that I did not include in the cut for the reading, which is, Ben Thompson talks about this idea of aggregator theory. And he applies it more broadly than just for the specific tech platforms that are doing things with user data, he applies it to Netflix and other things as well, but I think there's a point that you made that I think really nicely intersects there. You have this ephemeral thing that you could think of as the social graph, of, how do we know each other and know other things? That's not something that is owned by Facebook, but there is a function, by us all having put in that data into this specific organization, they now sort of are claiming ownership of the maintenance of that those relationships.

There's something to be said about how that has—there's market potential where Facebook can cut off access to other apps, and from other aspects, like economic impacts from companies that can or cannot exist or need to exist within the rule of Facebook. But I think there's an underlying issue, which is not a pricing issue. This is a power issue. When we think about, how is that power leveraged, the main issue is when you have these types of things that have a whirlpool effect, where as more people adopt, more of this data is pumped into this one monopoly, and if we don't challenge the notion that this data should be owned by an organization, then I think there's questions that fall out. What are the restrictions on power? Or do they have unbridled power?

One of the things that's interesting, I think, that we may or may not see in this COVID era, is, there are applications for having these organizations with such a vast reach and pretty comprehensive, ability to use the data how they need to, has led to some positive social outcomes, where like Facebook is publishing data, like how fast are people spreading—or, not maintain maintaining quarantine. Google and like Apple are able to leverage those data assets to publish or create this content or large-scale contact tracing thing for the world, which is amazing.

I think there are questions still about, how is that decision being made? There's still other questions about other consequences. And also, one thing we haven't even touched on, which I didn't even think about prior to the reading is natural monopolies as a thing that exists as well, with like utilities, where we agree that there are certain things where it makes sense to have one entity just build and maintain the thing, and there are rules and restrictions around it. But we haven't really talked about that in a tech context either. But to bring it back to your point, I think that is what I think of when I think of data monopolies. I'm thinking mainly from the user context. And that then ends up boiling down to a handful of very specific tech entities.

BRENDAN: I have a definition of a data monopoly that I personally use, and it's more boring, less useful, and has a bit of a higher bar, I think. Higher bar not in that it's more valuable. I think it's important to distinguish between—the way that I understand this problem is like through the idea of, Is this an a monopoly? Or is this an economy of scale? Meaning, like, if we consider the original notion of monopoly, you could say, hey, Apple has a monopoly on the iPhone, or Apple has a monopoly on great laptops. No, they have an economy of scale. It's very expensive to spin up a company that makes laptops, and they've figured out a way to get there. I think that's kind of healthy innovation, where you see a lot of folks who can sit in garages and figure out ways to create these breakthrough things that work well.

And then I think, a monopoly—if we use the classic thing and then sort of leverage ourselves into the data side, monopoly is quite specifically, when an actor in a market leverages their position to suppress competition. That may not be the right definition, but that's generally kind of the vibe we're working with.

When we talk about the phrase "data monopoly", I think it's really important to distinguish those two things. And I think that I subscribe pretty heavily to the belief that all data is about people and all data has some grounding. In reality, almost everything is—all data, at some level is an observation of what we call the real world, structured into some way and jammed into a database somewhere. I think that's really important when you talk about a data monopoly, because I think for something to constitute a data monopoly, the actual correctness of the data must reside with the owner of the data, which is distinct from the observed world style of data. And I think that the Facebook example is really great. I actually don't think that Facebook's social graph is a data monopoly, because at the end of the day, my friends are my friends and I choose who they are. And if I ever in if I ever logged on to Facebook, and said, unfriend this person and Facebook said no, or if I discovered that they continued to advertise us as friends elsewhere, I would be very frustrated. I might leave Facebook. Because there, I know a thing to be true, I believe a thing to be true. And Facebook is not the arbiter of that truth. And this gets sticky, but bear with me for a second. I think it should be a very high bar for someone to say that you have a data monopoly. Monopoly should imply that, if we change this number in this database, you are no longer friends. That should be the bar for a social graph monopoly.

JONATHAN: I'm going to posit that there is—to use a different example, and maybe this is a good and useful one, it's like, does Amazon have monopoly on online sales? Like, functionally? You could argue, no, you could easily stand up your own website. But like, what percent of ecommerce is going through Amazon? I think there's a similar effect. Even if you, as the user, get to modify and update the data, there is a question to: what is the ability of a competing social network or anyone else to actually create that data asset? And does Facebook by its mere existence negate that like network effect?

Some of it is anticompetitive in the actions Facebook takes, so like, obviously look at like, what does Instagram do when Snapchat is about to release something: rip as quickly as possible. But I think there's also this lock-in mechanism as well, which is, what do they do that is kind of anti-user but pro-Facebook? There's specific actions on the platform, but I think then also, if you were to say, I need to leave Facebook, how do they enable that? Yes, you do own the correctness of the data, or if you were to turn off your profile, I think now, with GDPR, there are more rights associated with you. But there are still questions about, what has already been scraped and pulled elsewhere? Clearview AI has been in the news as super creepy on this front. Do you even have control at that point?

I think there's then an underlying technology. So there's really two divergent thoughts, but like the first one being, maybe it is an economy of scale, and at a certain functional scale, you suffocate everyone else. The act of you building out your social network, again, is pretty high. And maybe one might argue that that's not impossibly high. But I do wonder if there is something there. And then two is, what are the choices? What sort of choices do we then subscribe to based on if Facebook has the ability to keep most of us on there and retain this information? What choices are we subjected to outside of that? From, what algorithms or value choices that are made on our behalf that get serviced? And all of this stems, I think from, they can maintain the data, or they have an ability to make it harder to migrate off of their platforms. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe it doesn't meet the bar of monopoly, but it is something. I don't know what it is.

PETER: Yeah, it's hard, like, there's a real loss coming out. The biggest things in relationship to Facebook is this feeling of loss of control. And it isn't just about data, right? It isn't just about data, or representation, it's about, you know, to what extent we can shape our social relationships and so forth. Where do our intuitions for monopolies come from? For me, it's the company town, the company store, and your ability to choose alternatives. And in that environment, it's pretty clear what an alternative to the company store might look like. But what service is Facebook providing? I'm sure they have some very carefully chosen narratives that their lawyers would present in answering that question, but each of us actually does use it quite a bit differently. It plays a whole bunch of different kind of roles in social life, in organizing community events, and getting your brand out there, whatever. So it's really hard to think about. I think any one of those people might be able to bring a case about how they don't have a real alternative.

Is data central to that? I mean, I guess, is data the unit of control? Is it is it the mechanisms at the forum, I don't know. On a philosophical level, I don't really know how to grapple with this. But it is really close to my heart. In particular, that that sense of control is not just the data itself that I put in there, you know, the particular records or interactions or whatever, but my ability to shape those interactions, which is a bit more what people are concerned with, with the timeline, which is actually super disempowering. Because nobody knows even how it works. If they shape the UI in a particular way and that and that impacts how I can interact with the world, or they change the spam control or whatever, that's one thing I couldn't say, I understand that. I have no idea what's going on. I can't say, show me all of the coefficients for how much you think I like this person so I can tweak them. So I don't really know where to start I think Facebook is an especially confusing place for me to start. If we think that there's a class of things that are data monopolies, Google Maps is a little bit easier for me to grapple with.

BRENDAN: I think I would posit your social security number, your credit score. Those, I think, are better examples of things that are, in fact, condoned monopolies. If someone changes yourself, security number, your life is over. The source of truth for social security numbers—when somebody looks up a social security number and whatever answer they get back, that's a source of truth. Your credit score, right? Whoever controls the association between your name and your credit score, that that is where there is an inversion between what's real on the ground, my actions, and a figure in a database and where a modification of that database has horrific real impacts that go the other way, that impact the real world, not starting from who my friends are and propagating outward. To me, those would be examples of monopolies that I think are an easier framework for understanding what a monopoly is. I think it's really important to cleave apart something that can be frustrating or bad or an economy of scale from where we need to step in from the regulatory perspective. That should be a it's a really, really, "break glass in case of emergency" moment in my mind. There should be other mechanisms to fix stuff like Facebook being terrible.

KELSEY: So, coming all the way back to Peter's question, what's a data monopoly? what's become clear to me here is that we don't have a great solid definition, which I think is a valuable and unsurprising result. So I checked the dictionary online in the meanwhile, and a monopoly is "the exclusive possession or control of the supply of a traded commodity or service". I think that's from Oxford. Which is really not what we're talking about here. Brendan's definition definitely talked about active suppression, which leads me to the question of, is it possible then to accidentally or incidentally be in a monopoly if you're, if you're not being evil, per se , can you still be a monopoly? Because, kinda yeah, I think. Then there's the pragmatic definition that you can get out of the Getty lawsuit. they had this great quote, which is that the Getty folks were suing Google over this whole image available in HD thing, they were saying, well, nobody visits our site anymore because your site just finds our stuff and surfaces it to people better, which—totally sensible. And then, Google said, well, fine, we can exclude you if you want, you can either be on our site or not be on our site. And the Getty response was that that was no option at all: "allowing the harm to continue, or becoming invisible on the internet". And that's a pretty great pragmatic definition of monopoly: you do it our way, or you don't exist.

MATT: I think that's important. That was an important moment because it shows—Google has monopolistic power as a search provider. That is, however, power over data. So what it fundamentally has is a gigantic database of links and how they're related to each other. It leverages that power in lots of different ways, in this case with Getty, to force conformance to its to its parameters. That's distinct from what Brendan was talking about, it seems to me, because I don't think it's the same thing as being the source of truth. I thought that, nonetheless, I was really interested in why we tolerate a government monopoly on the assignment of social security numbers. And it seems to me there are probably really good reasons to do so. Right? Which you might question if you start to question the legitimacy of the state. I don't know, I was pretty interested in both. I didn't want to drop that. But I thought that what Kelsey said there was really insightful.

PETER: I can expand on that, paired up in the in the chat, in the case of Getty versus Google, Google has a bunch of data that protects it from from competition by other search engines. Getty's problem is one of publicity, and Google is the only way that you can get that. It's Google or nothing. So those are two different issues, or issues at two different levels.

KELSEY: I thought it was really interesting. Just by itself, it's an important point. There's a lot of different ways that that very wise-looking quote could be interpreted.

BRENDAN: Yeah, I think he did a really good job of cleaving apart the two. I think there is a classic monopoly. Today, we're talking about data monopolies. We're exploring wha this term even means; we kind of just threw it at the wall. And I think that this is the perfect way to do this. . If we spend the whole time defining a data monopoly, I think that's a really worthwhile exercise. We had some talk about the notion of data monopolies in the era of Coronavirus. I want to turn us a little bit and pivot on the idea of a social security number. And take the idea that there's a foundation of a sort of immutable thing, right? Let's use a credit score, actually, because it's better. There's this truth that is intrinsic to the world that we're trying to model with the database, right? Just basically your financial reputation. Actually measuring the raw thing is impossible. And so we use these proxies, and we write down those proxies. And then we rely on the people that keep the proxies. And so we get these sort of chains where there's a thing that is true in the world, and then there are people who are in the business of writing down that thing and becoming a proxy for truth. That sort of organization is particularly problematic when the thing that you are modeling is immutable, such as: Are you or are you not presently infected with a virus? Or, what is the current status of your health? There's a reason that we really care about healthcare data and that we have a massive amount of regulation about what you can and cannot do with it. It's the kind of information that, once learned, if it is learned truly, it can't be unlearned, because it's tied to a truth in the world.

BRENDAN: I have to I have to come out and admit—I hate admitting this on this call. I have done a bit of a 180 on blockchains in the in the world of Coronavirus. I know. Because if you really think about it, if you tie this question of trust in state—for me the the frustration with blockchains has always been that they seem like a lot of work for very little payoff, but when we talk about this idea of, okay, now we have these immutable sources of information. And we're going to put some intermediary between us and that thing. We now have a very pressing need for accuracy on this. We need to know, to be able to contact trace, to actually understand how a virus is propagating through the community. This is a situation where the freedoms of the individual and the freedoms of the of the group are in direct, diametric pressure, and they need to be solved. And if you end up in a situation where someone steps forth and says, okay, we will put one person forth and they will become the arbiter of contact racing, or Apple and Google's sort of partnership to put forth a framework for this. I find that to be subpar. I think that, in the long run—this is fundamentally healthcare data, this fundamentally cannot change. And putting all the cards in that sack—long term, imagine we had enough time—this should be on blockchain. We should actually be using a decentralized ledger for this kind of thing, and participation in this should be— I personally now have switched to the view that you should probably just be mandated to participate in that sort of thing. I know, it sounds crazy. To those who know me, the idea of me being okay with the idea of a blockchain, it's a weird feeling. But it feels like it's a problem for which many of the existing solutions just don't cut it. How do you not get the NSA out of whoever holds those keys? How do you not get some really dramatic... This is a lot of material, it will affect some people's lives, and the disposal of that information is really problematic. So I'll just back away from that, but I wanted to try and tie this to Coronavirus because that was in the reading.

MATT: Can I ask a clarifying question? I think that other people want to respond. I just was a little confused at the end there. I mean, the problem that I see is that the thing that's an obvious problem is is privacy with healthcare data. It wasn't clear to me how blockchain fixes that, because blockchain allows you to authorize, you know, to validate a claim. But it doesn't really help you keep things private, does it?

BRENDAN: It can also be used to mean that the number of actors in a space cannot be totally known. So you can actually set up a blockchain so that everybody participating—it's basically like a network of only social security numbers that can change but have to change in a causal way. This isn't a blockchain in the classic sense, but any sort of system design that involves a central arbiter that says, we are going to be the source of truth on this—I think that it's important to highlight the problem here. You have an immutable source of information, snd then a lot of people who are vying to be a central arbiter of truth. And to me, that is the definition of a data monopoly, that we're being asked to be granted a monopoly over a sort of truth-granting style of information. And anybody can join the mining process of a blockchain, right? Anybody can participate in, I could right now create a keypair and buy bitcoin and assign it to a wallet. I can be an actor in a sort of system that allows me to be a part of it. So anybody can start participating in a blockchain that properly hides your identity, but allows you to control the disclosure of information.

MATT: I feel like I'm a little bit slow on it. But I want to let other people respond. I think other people have responses.

PETER: No. I don't feel like talking about blockchain.

BRENDAN: I know it's I know it's anathema in many in many contexts. I'm sorry.

What if we, instead of saying blockchain, let's take away this radicalizing word, and just talk about decentralization, because that's the characteristic that we need to focus on. I think that we need a system where, ideally, we would be seeking out alternatives to this type of data monopoly.

PETER: Have you been keeping up with the design of privacy and their solutions?

BRENDAN: Yeah, that they're putting forth, specifically the Apple-Google paper?

PETER: Yeah, there was that, and then I think France had another model, France and Germany, although last I knew, Germany capitulated to—there was a privacy tradeoff, right? I don't remember very well now, but the design of that system was such that—if I remember correctly, and it's been a little while and I didn't pay that much attention, but like the design was such that a person could find out whether they'd been in contact with other people infected, without there being a central database of people. Google, despite being you know, they don't do evil, big evil corporation was the one advocating for you know, people can find out, I think it was with more precision, geographic and time precision that you could actually figure out exactly who it was, whereas the European solution would just tell you that you had been around somebody who had been infected, but that required more of a central source of truth, as you say, a synoptic view of the world, whereas the Google solution just sort of matched numbers up, and then you knew you knew your numbers, the the set of numbers that you'd advertise yourself under. So that seemed okay.

BRENDAN: Yeah, and I should have backed away from the phrase blockchain, it was the wrong phrase to use at the time because it's too problematic. So that's the point that I'm trying to seek in on. Although it is not classically called a blockchain, it is leveraging many, many, many techniques that have been really hardened and improved in the blockchain space. I honestly don't think that we would be in a position to vet those papers—just personally, there's no way I would have been able to without reading around cryptography that we do for privatized decentralized ledgers. I don't want to be triggering with the phrase blockchain, but I very much agree. I think that that's, that's the thing we want, right? We want the Apple-Google paper as proposed, in the sense of being a decentralized source of information.

PETER: I'm just going to start sipping whiskey over here. And now I don't know what were we talking about? We're sorry, talking about social security numbers and credit card squares. Are we still mining that thread? as it were?

KELSEY: I have a totally different direction, if anyone wants that.

PETER: Sure.

KELSEY: Yeah, so I'm curious about, um, and this might be a short topic, because some of you might be more informed than me on this. But if we take say that a monopoly is having the sole source of a particular thing, or type of thing.... an exercise that I would like to do sometime, and if this exists somewhere, I would love to see it, is I want to see the parts of me that Google has come to own over the years. The most dramatic of those, I think, is when they bought Fitbit. Quietly, most people don't even know that. It's just like, Huh, so you have been reading my emails for years, know who all of my contacts are and where I go based on my phone, and you're probably in my home, listening to every word that I say, and there's a camera. And additionally, you know my heart rate every day at every moment.

If we take all that, and feed that into a machine learning model, the number of columns they've added means that they can make categorically different models of people than anybody else. So I'm kind of positing that as a data monopoly that's quite different from our other definitions.

PETER: It's really interesting. I'm trying to model that philosophically, like, what's going on? Who has a monopoly on what? They have a great deal of information. That's a resource that allows them to do certain things that other people can't provided to me. I have no alternative. They do a better job of certain things, because they have all that data. But it's not actually that much better of a job, to be honest.

KELSEY: Well, I guess I should clarify, right? So I don't mean that as a consumer, we have no choice but to be owned by Google. What I'm saying is that, if I were purchasing models of people, Google would be the only supplier of this complete of a model.

MATT: You know, why isn't that just because they have a better product than other people?

KELSEY: Isn't that where monopolies come from?

MATT: I don't think so. I mean, a lot of them come from guns and dollars. A lot of the oil monopolies come from suppressing various kinds of dissent over the course of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So yeah, I don't think it's about being better.

PETER: But I mean, it is a good question. Is doing something really well, or having a lot of power in that sense, a threat in a similar way to a monopoly? I guess that wasn't the point you were making, because you're talking about if I wanted to buy personas. I'm still in the consumer frame.

MATT: This is where I really think that the economic origin of the term monopoly is is unhelpful, because I think that the problem that monopolies pose is a concentration of power, which is difficult to dislodge. So it's a concentration of power, that by its nature increases. It arises perhaps apart from the market position, and so it maybe has its origins in economic phenomena, but the problem that matters the most is the increasing scope of the corporate entities' control over your actions.

What we're wary of, I think, is this sense of a positive feedback loop for corporations operating on a certain scale, with data at a certain scale, that makes it increasingly difficult for alternatives to emerge, whether those are other companies or other ways of life. That's what seems to me like the evil that we're concerned about.

PETER: Yeah, and and the mechanism, at least in Google, Facebook, Twitter's cases, is actually making things free, which is sort of interesting. That's the lock-in. People lament the loss of Google Reader, not just because it was such a wonderful thing, but because they made it free and totally took all the oxygen out of the system.

BRENDAN: I really like your framing a lot better, Matt: how do we dislodge people who have ended up in positions of power? I think that the "data monopoly" term that we initially came up with and built a whole reading group around puts an economic slant on things, that creates this self-disqualifying thought loop. Because I think that every time we've gone to talk about a data monopoly, we kind of want to talk, we want to talk about the sense of powerlessness, we want to talk about this sense of frustration.

I think I sort of helped poison the well with the economies of scale thing. Because there is a point where this tops out, where Google just gets so deep into your life that nobody else could ever get that deep into your life. No one could ever amass such a complete picture because of these positive feedback loops. Sort of like, well, we bought Fitbit, and then we bla bla bla, and it becomes something that could not ever be replicated and worsens. But I think that's not nearly as important as the question that you've put forth, Matt, of like, how do we have a framework for understanding a threshold at which it feels like someone has amassed a picture of you that you are now beholden to, instead of it being beholden to you?

Can I just throw a heuristic out there: every now and then, I'll pretty routinely just try and change my behavior really aggressively on the internet, including writing bots that will go to very different websites, or do all kinds of weird stuff, just to see if I can shake the ads, the bucketing of which thing I'm in, into like a more interesting... It's purely for fun, but it's fun to see how easy it is to get the machine to think that you're somebody else. And it makes me feel really re-empowered. Because it's like, oh, cool. I've just been out searching for pregnancy tests and, you know, a bunch of different things that would not match my typical characteristics. I think it's, it's just fun and interesting, but that feels like really like a guerrilla tactic, and really like a last resort to what is admittedly a sense of helplessness in the face of a very complete picture of who I am as a person.

PETER: To me, those are issues of privacy and autonomy. Are you saying those are more interesting than data monopolies? Or are you saying that those are related to the ideas of monopolies?

BRENDAN: I think it is, I think we have the framing wrong. And then, I want to talk about that, that sense of helplessness and like that. Where does that come from? And how do we take it back?

PETER: I think that's the drive behind the whole decentralization wave, is wanting to sort of cut free.

JONATHAN: I think there's an interesting test for this. If you were to think of Apple, do you feel like Apple has a data monopoly, for those of you who use Apple devices? Do you feel like Apple has a data monopoly on your data? When I pose that test to myself, I don't feel the same way that I do about Facebook and Google. And it's interesting to try to tease apart why I think that is. There's definitely a lock-in you get. There's a running joke with my roommates about how we will not let someone into our apartment is not on iMessage because we can't have the roommate group chat. So there are lock-in events that could take the anti-competitive bit, but fundamentally, I don't think there's the same feeling, aside from maybe like USB ports, that there is a lack of control over my information. But then I do notice, if anyone has ever ventured to check out Apple Maps in the last decade, it does do some weird stuff if you ever tried using it. I was using it when I was up in my mountain cabin. It does pick up things, where it gets kind of awkward. It will give you directions because on Thursdays you go to this restaurant to order stuff. Or like, we think this is home for you. When I was like in Canada, it guessed my Airbnb as home, and it marks it as home. And it was creepy from Apple's perspective, but knowing what Apple has already said, it felt less creepy, but there's something there about autonomy of choice.

Maybe it is business models versus motivations. When a business model is very clearly aligned with ads and the access of your information, it feels a little bit different, and it's also then compounded by, they will make more money if you stay on, so how do they engage you, and this idea of psychological manipulation. Apple, while overpriced, is very direct. You're just gonna hand us money and that's gonna be the end of this transaction.

BRENDAN: I think that's a really important characteristic. It seems that your belief that you are not being dominated by a power structure is tied to your faith in the institution that you are participating in. Fair?

JONATHAN: I think so. I think there's something about, and not to get back into the DWebby side of this, but I do think there is something about how these technologies came to be. There is always like an implicit choice. And some of it is a function of the technology stack. It feels like it is much more natural for things that are funded by ads to imply that there is some sort of access—I don't know if anyone's ever tried this as an experiment. I signed up for their ads platform, just to see, if I was an advertiser, what would I have access to? It is interesting. You basically can put in a bunch of keywords and you can specify a geography and stuff. Or you can even like take a look and see, Facebook now lets you see what they think they know about you, and it's wildly off. And so there is definitely a lot of outrage, and I think rightly so. There is directionally correct outrage, I guess, is maybe the right thing to phrase it as. I think there are principles that are not necessarily enshrined in any law, or like, there's no faith that Facebook is abiding by things that are giving freedom of choice. And then in this black box, people get really worried about, what are all the ways in which this can be misused and used incorrectly. And I think that's part of the issue, where there's not a ton of trust. And especially when the business model would skew heavily in the favor of this other organization, this other organization being Facebook, the business model would be benefited greatly by abusing that trust. Then it's really hard. Facebook is the specific example where the CEO has, many times, been like, "I don't care about privacy". So like, there's also that,

KELSEY: I was gonna say, we're all kind of ribbing on Facebook's ability to give advertisers—the ways you can get around the algorithms and how the targeting is honestly not that good. I'm trying to remember what book it was that I was reading, that made this point. But basically, just because they're not good at it now, doesn't mean that the huge amount of data that they have and are continuing to gather won't become usable in much better models. And in fact, that is the most likely outcome.

MATT: It's hard to know if maybe the term "data monopolies" is not so useful, and really all we care about is the coercive power of data stores. Maybe there's something to be said for the way in which the distribution of that data creates coercive power. So if you're the principal actor that has access to this particular data store, then you have the capacity to coerce the market but also to coerce people into certain kinds of actions. And I think maybe a lot of our thinking in the last three, four years is influenced by the this idea that there's this kind of dark nexus between experimental psychology and fine-grained profiling that creates a manipulative power that is incompatible with democratic practice and also incompatible with the Enlightenment, with the idea that it's possible to to create a state of free individuals who are capable of autonomous rational thought. I think that there there's something about data concentration that undermines that. Probably that's something that's along the lines of what we care about with data monopolies, but "data monopoly" is not actually great term for describing that.

BRENDAN: I just want to build on what Matt was saying. I think that the the notion of the dark nexus is the is the capacity to build a constant personalized hallucination, right? This idea that we could—I posted in chat that I'm thinking a lot about the right to be forgotten. We are moving forward in time, and that that is always the case, but right now we are very much at the dawn of a of a place where people are starting to amass these profiles, and we're in new territory, right? We don't know what this is like. We don't know what the effects of this level of knowledge totality or perceived knowledge totality really are. And the scary thing is, like there are many of us, maybe I'm one of them, everyone falls somewhere on the spectrum of realizing at some point that the database that accumulates of you is the sum choice of every decision you've ever made on any platform, right? So every time you choose to post, every single time you choose to disclose something, it is this like little karat that accumulates and accumulates and accumulates. And it is a unidirectional knowledge acquisition. And that is a very scary thing when you look backwards, right? When you realize that you have no capacity to control the tail of this thing. I think when we move through the world, that we, as a species, forget stuff. We don't all as a culture—I don't remember every bad interaction I've had with everybody in the world. Databases don't, and they don't have that forgetfulness property when maintained properly. That's a very cognitively difficult thing to get your head around. It's really hard to understand what it's like to live in a world that is permanent in some ways and ephemeral in others, depending on where you are, who you're speaking to, and how you are communicating. I think that's the kernel that we're getting at with this data monopolies framing that the conversation has evolved out of this. I want the capacity to turn to that memory machine and say, I would selectively like you to forget about this, and have an enshrined law that says that I have the choice to do that, that I as a rational person know that this is a one-way thing and I will suffer some loss in service quality for it. But I want to do it anyway.

PETER: Who has the right to be forgotten? Is that an EU thing? Yeah.

So I just wanted to pull out, sort of categorize—I'm not proud of it, but, there's my information, which is in no way a priority. It's the things that are my interactions and things that I say, my emails and so forth and control over that is sort of one bucket, which I've been thinking about a lot. It's where my brain has been most of the time, there's information about me and how I'm seeing, which is I think what you're talking more about. And then there's sort of information that's basically a commodity. Whether it's Getty Images, or Google's indexes, or Amazon's listings, things that probably could be reproduced, or things have been published, public observations about the world, Google Maps and so forth. Each of those things, we could go down and it would be its own domain. I'd love to create the space for that. Just the concerns are very different, and the tools we have available are very different. Your questions about like, the role of open source, the role of government, the role of trust in non governmental organizations like Google and Apple—I'd love to get a chance to talk about the more personal stuff, if there's a space for that.

Chat log

  • 00:14:18 Kelsey Breseman: January!
  • 00:14:24 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: IN THE BEFORE TIME
  • 00:14:34 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: :facepalm:
  • 00:15:23 maceo.mercey: don't make too much of an effort o nthe bullshit front.
  • 00:18:21 Kelsey Breseman: https://hackmd.io/oEcuKALCTi-PbawLmT_Ixw?both
  • 00:20:00 Peter Abrahamsen: rainhead
  • 00:23:03 maceo.mercey: I htink you start is good
  • 00:23:40 Kelsey Breseman: Apparently it was Bork who did that? Or at least that’s what Goliath suggested
  • 00:25:13 Kelsey Breseman: this is the key article for that https://www.newyorker.com/business/adam-davidson/teddy-roosevelt-wouldnt-understand-the-eus-antitrust-fine-against-google
  • 00:28:17 Kelsey Breseman: I like it bc it’s two potentially valid takes
  • 00:34:20 Kelsey Breseman: lol just read The Shock Doctrine in which Klein gives a litany of all the places Friedman’s thought has caused massive harm
  • 00:34:33 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: omg that book
  • 00:34:41 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: pinochet
  • 00:37:36 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: oOooOOOOOoooo
  • 00:37:37 Kelsey Breseman: good question
  • 00:39:26 Jonathan Victor: https://stratechery.com/2017/defining-aggregators/
  • 00:39:31 Jonathan Victor: (Not in the reading)
  • 00:43:11 Kelsey Breseman: for varying connotations of “amazing"
  • 00:43:25 Kelsey Breseman: was wondering if that would come up
  • 00:45:47 maceo.mercey: for me the issue is: in what contexts is a data reservoir a pure power aggregator which precludes the formation of alternatives -- and I personally care less about what happens in the market than what happens in other parts of our lives.
  • 00:46:33 Kelsey Breseman: “People You May Know"?
  • 00:46:51 maceo.mercey: so you are the source of truth about yourself, and that means fb can never have a monopoly?
  • 00:47:06 Peter Abrahamsen: data as commodity -- Facebook data isn't a commodity
  • 00:47:10 maceo.mercey: peter did you have a hand up?
  • 00:47:15 Peter Abrahamsen: meh
  • 00:47:45 Kelsey Breseman: how ‘bout Google+
  • 00:47:52 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: to me, that’s an “dataset of scale"
  • 00:48:37 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: totally, the “right to be forgotten"
  • 00:52:05 maceo.mercey: I think that's a real questin. I wonder too. Maybe we need better examples
  • 00:52:38 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: chronological tweets plz
  • 00:53:13 maceo.mercey: b5 you next
  • 00:53:17 maceo.mercey: and kelsey
  • 00:53:54 maceo.mercey: credit score seems like a really good examle to me.
  • 00:53:57 Kelsey Breseman: want to revisit centralization vs monopoly (esp in gvt context)
  • 00:54:20 Peter Abrahamsen: what market is being monopolized in the case of credit scores?
  • 00:54:30 Peter Abrahamsen: or social security numbers
  • 00:54:31 maceo.mercey: so maybe a good question is: why do we tolerate the ssn monopoly?
  • 00:54:42 Kelsey Breseman: define “we”
  • 00:55:52 maceo.mercey: and "facebook is terrible" may be better grounded in other features, many of them easily enumerable.
  • 00:57:23 Peter Abrahamsen: data is a resource; the market is publicity
  • 00:57:37 Kelsey Breseman: oo I want to hear that expanded ^
  • 00:59:34 maceo.mercey: b5 has a hand
  • 01:00:58 maceo.mercey: so now we're getting closer to dweb style arguments. source of truth
  • 01:01:05 Kelsey Breseman: I’d say gvt is not a monopoly bc their mandate is to serve the people &&! they are accountable to democratic election, unlike a company
  • 01:01:48 Kelsey Breseman: to the extent we believe that’s true, SSN monopoly is fine yeah?
  • 01:01:57 maceo.mercey: i disagree -- govt's have monopolostic power overe.g. violence. that claim to authority is central to the operation of the state.
  • 01:02:13 Kelsey Breseman: ^
  • 01:02:40 maceo.mercey: freedom of hte indivudual and the social good maybe
  • 01:02:48 Kelsey Breseman: for the greater good
  • 01:03:30 maceo.mercey: we're in a crazy moment.
  • 01:04:04 Kelsey Breseman: sounds like what Matt’s saying in chat a bit tbh
  • 01:09:57 maceo.mercey: brendan has to put a quarter i nthe swearing jar
  • 01:10:10 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: HAh!
  • 01:10:13 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: I will
  • 01:11:21 maceo.mercey: so why do we call that monopoly?
  • 01:13:10 Kelsey Breseman: I mean, they bought all these other companies
  • 01:13:12 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: google is infamously short on info about your social graph
  • 01:15:31 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: jonathan we don’t have a good way to get your hand
  • 01:15:35 Kelsey Breseman: free/“free”
  • 01:15:35 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: (if you have a thought)
  • 01:15:42 maceo.mercey: yes I was thinking tht too.
  • 01:16:19 Kelsey Breseman: ha well otherwise we’re just talking about decentralization again
  • 01:17:34 Kelsey Breseman: the “can you walk away from it” metric?
  • 01:18:31 Kelsey Breseman: comes back to Obfuscation: A User’s Guide to Privacy and Protest
  • 01:19:48 maceo.mercey: that's cause apple is such a great affective manipulator
  • 01:20:09 maceo.mercey: so you don't feel owned, maybe
  • 01:20:15 Peter Abrahamsen: I trust Apple more than Google or Facebook, because I feel I understand their motivations better
  • 01:21:51 Kelsey Breseman: is this like why you’re not supposed to let a guy buy your dinner
  • 01:22:01 maceo.mercey: ^ I hink so
  • 01:22:58 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: literally, what does facebook even do
  • 01:23:01 Kelsey Breseman: tbh it’s not that good
  • 01:23:20 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: you can geotarget on facebook for $1000
  • 01:24:49 Peter Abrahamsen: incompetence shouldnt' be reassuring
  • 01:25:02 Kelsey Breseman: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45029192-a-human-algorithm
  • 01:25:23 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: I’m thinking a lot about the right to be forgotten
  • 01:26:47 Kelsey Breseman: the growing sense that we can be easily manipulated
  • 01:27:42 maceo.mercey: the squirrels under my roof are massing troops and tanks and preparing an invasion of my room.
  • 01:27:50 maceo.mercey: it's distracting
  • 01:28:07 Peter Abrahamsen: invite them in, it'll be adorable
  • 01:28:26 Kelsey Breseman: also it feels like we’ve been letting all this stuff be tracked forever but … smartphones were post-2000, that’s not v long ago for us to know much
  • 01:29:02 Kelsey Breseman: the right to accidental forgiveness
  • 01:29:20 maceo.mercey: it's not just culture, right? it's part of what makes action possible. ty cataloging every bad thing you did, then seeify ou cna wake up and getout of bed he next mrning.
  • 01:30:08 maceo.mercey: I'm gonna have to go right at 7 my time
  • 01:30:09 maceo.mercey: 4 yrs
  • 01:30:33 Kelsey Breseman: thanks for facilitating! Want to help us wrap up, or delegate?
  • 01:31:20 maceo.mercey: finish your thought!
  • 01:31:41 maceo.mercey: oh my god they are so close to breaking in, I can ehear htem.
  • 01:31:52 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: lawl
  • 01:32:03 maceo.mercey: i thought so too
  • 01:32:03 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: this has been a delightful discussion!
  • 01:32:29 Kelsey Breseman: a data together classic, not reading the readings
  • 01:32:36 b5 | Brendan O'Brien: ^^
  • 01:33:08 Kelsey Breseman: #74
  • 01:33:38 Kelsey Breseman: Trust
  • 01:33:41 Kelsey Breseman: not antitrust