[governance] open standard for "facebook crowd" interactions

[Norbert Bollow]

McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 7:45 PM, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> > McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> whatever happened to focusing on ACTUAL INTERNET GOVERNANCE
> >> activities, instead of talking endlessly about shapes of tables for
> >> potential IG bodies???
> >
> > Cool idea.
> >
> > How's the following for a topic?
> >
> > I think that it should be possible for me to interact with anyone who
> > is "on facebook" and who wants to interact with me, without having to
> > put my personal data onto the servers of a company that I don't trust
> > at all, and which in addition is under the jurisdiction of a country
> > whose legal system I trust much less than I trust the Swiss one.
> >
> > Now I'm not demanding that Facebook Inc. should go out business or
> > that they'd have to "give away" copies of their software, just that
> > there should be open interfaces allowing others to implement their own
> > software to communicate with the "facebook crowd" while keeping their
> > personal data on servers of their own choosing. (And analogously for
> > other "social network" server based services.)
> 
> Those things already exist, and account (in part) for the success of
> FB/Twitter/etc.  Isn't that the whole point of APIs?
>
> from wikipedia:
> 
> More than 250,000 websites have integrated with Facebook Platform
> More than 100 million Facebook users engage with Facebook on external
> websites every month
> 
> That is why FB put Burson Marsteller on an anti-Google campaign
> recently, Google was scraping FB data for its "Social Circle".

As far as I know, those APIs are more about making external websites
part of Facebook's engine of collecting ever-more personal information
about people than about providing people with ways of interacting with
each other without leaking personal data to Facebook Inc.

But let's assume that I'm mistaken and APIs exist for everything that
I'd want...

> > I have no idea what would be a suitable forum for effectively
> > addressing this topic.
> 
> It has already been addressed IMO,

If the only way in which it has been partly addressed is by
unilateral actions of Facebook Inc. which the company takes
because these actions are expected to further their business
interests, then I am not satisfied about that kind of internet
governance which puts all this power mostly into the hands of
a single company and to some extent into the hands of the
government of the country where the company is headquartered.

> If you want to interact with FB, you are free to do so, if not, then
> don't (and build your own thing).

Suppose someone invested a lot of effort into building something
which meeting similar communication needs as FB, but with better
privacy properties. Network effects would likely cause this new
thing to be very unattractive to potential early adopters because
"everyone is on Facebook" unless sufficiently rich APIs are
available to effectively integrate the users of facebook.com
with the users of the new site into a single social network.

Even if we assume that suitable APIs for doing this exist *now*,
in the absence of any effective governance mechanism that takes
adequately into account also stakeholder interests which may
conflict with those of Facebook Inc. and the perceived interest
of the U.S. government, the company is not in any way obligated
to play along -- and the risk that they possibly wouldn't is
probably enough to prevent anyone from making the above-mentioned
investment.

Greetings,
Norbert
____________________________________________________________
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:
     governance at lists.cpsr.org
To be removed from the list, visit:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing

For all other list information and functions, see:
     http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:
     http://www.igcaucus.org/

Translate this email: http://translate.google.com/translate_t