Irina Bolychevsky

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Breaking up big tech isn’t enough. We need to break them open

Irina Bolychevsky - February 27, 2020 in Open Knowledge, Open Knowledge Foundation, personal-data

From advocates, politicians and technologists, calls for doing something about big tech grow louder by the day. Yet concrete ideas are few or failing to reach the mainstream. This post covers what breaking up big tech would mean and why it’s not enough. I propose an open intervention that will give people a real choice and a way out of controlled walled gardens. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple are not natural monopolies and we need to regulate them to support competition and alternative business models.

What’s the problem?

As a social species, our social and digital infrastructure is of vital importance. Just think of the postal service that even in the most extreme circumstances, would deliver letters to soldiers fighting on the front lines. There’s a complicated and not-risk-free system that makes this work, and we make it work, because it matters. It is so important for us to keep in touch with our loved ones, stay connected with news and what’s happening in our communities, countries and the planet. Our ability to easily and instantly collaborate and work with people halfway across the world is one of the wonders of the Information Age. The data we collect can help us make better decisions about our environment, transport, healthcare, education, governance and planning. It should be used to support the flourishing of all people and our planet. But right now, so much of this data, so much of our social digital infrastructure, is owned, designed and controlled by a tiny elite of companies, driven by profit. We’re witnessing the unaccountable corporate capture of essential services, reliance on exploitative business models and the increasing dominance of big tech monopolies. Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft use their amassed power to subvert the markets which they operate within, stifling competition and denying us real choice. Amazon has put thousands of companies out of business, leaving them the option to sell on their controlled platform or not sell at all. Once just a digital bookstore, Amazon now controls over 49% of the US digital commerce market (and growing fast) — selling everything from sex toys to cupcakes. Facebook (who, remember, also own Instagram and WhatsApp) dominates social, isolating people who don’t want to use their services. About a fifth of the population of the entire planet (1.6 billion) log in daily. They control a vast honeypot of personal data, vulnerable to data breaches, influencing elections and enabling the spread of misinformation. It’s tough to imagine a digital industry Google doesn’t operate in. These companies are too big, too powerful and too unaccountable. We can’t get them to change their behaviour. We can’t even get them to pay their taxes. And it’s way past time to do something about this.

Plans to break up monopolies

Several politicians are calling for breaking up big tech. In the USA, presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren wants two key interventions. One is to reverse some of the bigger controversial mergers and acquisitions which have happened over the last few years, such as Facebook with WhatsApp and Instagram, while going for a stricter interpretation and enforcement of anti-trust law. The other intervention is even more interesting, and an acknowledgement of how much harm comes from monopolies who are themselves intermediaries between producers and consumers. Elizabeth Warren wants to pass “legislation that requires large tech platforms to be designated as ‘Platform Utilities’ and broken apart from any participant on that platform”. This would mean that Amazon, Facebook or Google could not both be the platform provider and sell their own services and products through the platform. The EU has also taken aim at such platform power abuse. Google was fined €2.4 billion by the European Commission for denying “consumers a genuine choice by using its search engine to unfairly steer them to its own shopping platform”. Likewise, Amazon is currently under formal investigation for using their privileged access to their platform data to put out competing products and outcompete other companies’ products. Meanwhile, in India, a foreign-owned company like Amazon is already prohibited from being a vendor on their own electronic market place.

Breaking up big tech is not enough

While break up plans will go some way to address the unhealthy centralisation of data and power, the two biggest problems with big tech monopolies will remain:

It won’t give us better privacy or change the surveillance business models used by tech platforms; and
It won’t provide genuine choice or accountability, leaving essential digital services under the control of big tech.

The first point relates to the toxic and anti-competitive business models increasingly known as ‘Surveillance capitalism’. Smarter people than me have written about the dangers and dark patterns that emerge from this practice. When the commodity these companies profit from is your time and attention, these multi-billion companies are incentivised to hook you, manipulate you and keep dialing up the rampant consumerism which is destroying our planet. Our privacy and time is constantly exploited for profit. The break ups Warren proposes won’t change this. The second point means it still wouldn’t become it easier for other companies to compete or to experiment with alternative business models. Right now, it’s near impossible to compete with Facebook and Amazon since their dominance is built on ‘network effects’. Both companies strictly police their user network and data. People aren’t choosing these platforms because they are better, they default to them because that’s where everyone else is. Connectivity and reach is vital for people to communicate, share, organise and sell — there’s no option but to go where most people already are. So we’re increasingly locked in. We need to make it possible for other providers and services to thrive.

Breaking big tech open

Facebook’s numerous would-be competitors don’t fail through not being good enough or failing to get traction, or even funding. Path was beautiful and had many advantages over Facebook. Privacy-preserving Diaspora got a huge amount of initial attention. Scuttlebutt has fantastic communities. Alternatives do exist. None of them have reduced the dominance of Facebook. The problem is not a lack of alternatives, the problem is closed design, business model and network effects. What Facebook has, that no rival has, is all your friends. And where it keeps them is in a walled off garden which Facebook controls. No one can interact with Facebook users without having a Facebook account and agreeing to Facebook’s terms and conditions (aka surveillance and advertising). Essentially, Facebook owns my social graph and decides on what terms I can interact with my friends. The same goes for other big social platforms: to talk to people on LinkedIn, I have to have a LinkedIn account; to follow people on Twitter, I must first sign up to Twitter and so on. As users we take on the burden of maintaining numerous accounts, numerous passwords, sharing our data and content with all of these companies, on their terms. It doesn’t have to be this way. These monopolies are not natural, they are monopolies by design — choosing to run on closed protocols and walling off their users in silos. We need to regulate Facebook and others to force them to open up their application programme interfaces (APIs) to make it possible for users to have access to each other across platforms and services.

Technically, interoperability is possible

There are already examples of digital social systems which don’t operate as walled gardens: email for example. We don’t expect Google to refuse to deliver an email simply because we use an alternative email provider. If I send an email to a Gmail account from my Protonmail, FastMail or even Hotmail account — it goes through. It just works. No message about how I first have to get a Gmail account. This, fundamentally, is the reason email has been so successful for so long. Email uses an open protocol, supported by Google, Microsoft and others (probably due to being early enough, coming about in the heady open days of the web, before data mining and advertising became the dominant forces they are today … although email is increasingly centralised and dominated by Google). While email just works, a technology that’s very similar, such as instant messaging, doesn’t. We have no interoperability, which means many of us have upward of four different chat apps on our phones and have to remember which of our friends are on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp (owned by Facebook), Signal, Wire, Telegram, etc. We don’t carry around five phones so why do we maintain accounts with so many providers, each storing our personal details, each with a different account and password to remember? This is because these messaging apps use their own, closed, proprietary protocols and harm usability and accessibility in the process. This is not in the interests of most people. Interoperability and the use of open protocols would transform this, offering us a better experience and control over our data while reducing our reliance on any one platform. Open protocols can form the basis of a shared digital infrastructure that’s more resilient and would help us keep companies that provide digital services, accountable. It would make it possible to leave and choose whose services we use.

What would this look like in practice?

Say I choose to use a privacy-preserving service for instant messaging, photo sharing and events — possibly one of the many currently available today, or even something I’ve built or host myself. I create an event and I want to invite all my friends, wherever they are. This is where the open protocol and interoperability come in. I have some friends using the same service as me, many more scattered across Twitter, Facebook and other social services, maybe a few just on email. If these services allow interconnections with other services, then every person, wherever they are, will get my event invite and be able to RSVP, receive updates and possibly even comment (depending on what functionality the platforms support). No more getting left out as the cost of caring about privacy. Interoperability would be transformational. It would mean that:

I can choose to keep my photos and data where I have better access, security and portability. This gives us greater control over our data and means that…
Surveillance is harder and more expensive to do. My data will not all be conveniently centralised for corporations or governments to use in unaccountable ways I haven’t agreed to. Privacy
I won’t lose contact with, leave out, or forget friends who aren’t on the same platform as me. I can choose services which serve my needs better, not based on the fear of social exclusion or missing out. Hooray for inclusion and staying friends!
I’ll be less stressed trying to remember and contact people across different platforms with different passwords and accounts (e.g. this currently requires a Facebook event, email, tweets, WhatsApp group reminders and Mastodon, Diaspora and Scuttlebutt posts for siloed communities…)
Alternative services, and their alternative business models and privacy policies become much more viable! Suddenly, a whole ecosystem of innovation and experimentation is possible which is out of reach for us today. (I’m not saying it will be easy. Finding sustainable funding and non-advertising-based business models will still be hard and will require more effort and systemic interventions, but this is a key ingredient).

Especially this last point, the viability of creating alternatives, would start shifting the power imbalance between Facebook and its users (and regulators), making Facebook more accountable and incentivising them to be responsive to user wants and needs. Right now Facebook acts as it pleases because it can — it knows its users are trapped. As soon as people have meaningful choice, exploitation and abuse become much harder and more expensive to maintain.

So, how do we get there?

In the first instance, regulating Facebook, Twitter and others to make them open up their APIs so that other services can read/write to Facebook events, groups, messages etc. would be the first milestone. Yes, this isn’t trivial and there are questions to work out, but it can be done. Looking ahead, investing now in developing open standards for our social digital infrastructure is a must. Funders and governments should be supporting the work and adoption of open protocols and standards — working with open software and services to refine, test and use these standards and see how they work in practice over time. We’ll need governance mechanisms for evolving and investing in our open digital infrastructure that includes diverse stakeholders and accounts for power imbalances between them. We use platforms which have not been co-designed by us and on terms and conditions we have little say over. Investment into alternatives have largely failed outside of more authoritarian countries that have banned or blocked the likes of Google and Facebook. We need to do more to ensure our data and essential services are not in the hands of one or two companies, too big to keep accountable. And after many years of work and discussions on this, I believe openness and decentralisation must play a central role. Redecentralize.org and friends are working on a campaign to figure out how to make this a reality. Is this something you’re working on already or want to contribute and get invited to future workshops and calls? Then ping me on hello@redecentralize.org. The opportunity is huge. By breaking big tech open, we can build a fairer digital future for all, so come get involved! • This blogpost is an reposted version of a post originally published on the Redecentralize blog

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Project CKAN

Irina Bolychevsky - October 18, 2013 in ckan, development, getting involved, membership, News, Roadmap

Over the last few years CKAN has seen impressive growth in technology, uptake, number of deployments and in the vendor and developer communities. It is now the basis of dozens of major sites around the world, including national data portals in the UK, US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Germany, Austria and Norway. Once, almost all core CKAN development was done by the Open Knowledge Foundation; now, there are an increasing number of developers and providers, deploying, customising and working with CKAN. We believe that, as with many open-source projects when they achieve a certain size, the time has come to bring some more structure to the community of CKAN developers and users. By doing so we aim to provide a solid foundation for the future growth of the project, and to more explicitly empower its growing array of stakeholders. We are therefore proposing to create an independent, self-governed CKAN project at the Open Knowledge Foundation, separate from our own CKAN developments and offerings, to guide the future development and direction of the software. The main proposed actions are:

To establish a steering group and advisory board to oversee the project and represent the growing number of stakeholders.
To establish specific groups or teams to look after specific areas; in particular, a “technical group” to oversee technical development and a “content and outreach group” to oversee materials (including project website) and to drive community and user engagement.
To establish a membership model for stakeholders to support the long-term sustainability of the project.

The project will still have its formal institutional home at the Open Knowledge Foundation, and enjoy support and participation from our CKAN team. But it will be autonomous and will have its own independent governance, from a board drawn from major CKAN stakeholders. The Open Knowledge Foundation will continue to contribute at all levels, but this approach will allow others – from government users to suppliers of CKAN services – to have a formal role in the future development and direction of CKAN. Over the next couple of weeks we will be introducing a new structure for development (how to become a core contributor etc) and governance (steering committee and supporting ckan.org as a member) and we would love to hear your ideas and feedback. Please either get in touch or place ideas in this open project ckan document and watch this space for more posts soon!

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Civil Society Day and Unconference at the OGP

Irina Bolychevsky - October 16, 2013 in Events, Open Government Data

The Open Government Partnership Summit is the primary forum for the global community of openness reformers from all backgrounds – government, civil society and private sector – to come together and engage with each other. We’ve been helping organise the OGP Civil Society Day – the day before the Summit – which will provide an informal opportunity for over 400 civil society actors that are involved in OGP to connect, interact, learn and strategize. If you’re coming along, make sure to join us at the Unconference, which we will be running all day in parallel with the main sessions.

What? The Open Government Partnership Civil Society Day and Unconference
When? Wednesday 30th October, 8.30 – 17.00
Where? University of London Union, Malet Street.
Social media: Follow #CSOday #OGP13
More details: on the event page

What will we be talking about?

The objective of the day is that the OGP civil society community is energized, broadened, connected and, overall, is prepared for both the OGP Summit and for engaging with the OGP process in their own countries. The day will address these themes: Broaden: why and how to broaden the actors, issues and countries involved in OGP
Deepen: how to deepen the partnerships, push the level of ambition and create better plans
Connect: network with people working in different countries and on different issues, but facing similar realities
Inspire: hear inspiring stories from across the globe and explore new open government frontiers

Unconference

Create your own agenda! Is there a discussion that needs to happen? Do you want to ask questions, present finding for feedback or write up best practices or principles? We will be holding ‘Unconference’ sessions alongside the main agenda for the whole day. Propose a 30 minutes session on the day or sign up to do a 5 minute talk on your project, organisation or cause in one of the two ‘lightning talk’ sessions. Get in touch if you have an idea for this now.

More info

To see the full programme, click here
The event is now fully booked. Open Government Partnership (OGP) Logo

The OGP Civil Society Day is organised by the OGP, the OGP Civil Society Coordination Team, the Open Knowledge Foundation and Involve. Specific sessions are prepared by Access Info Europe, Alianza Regional, OpenCorporates, Open Rights Group, Publish What You Pay, World Resource Institute and the Transparency & Accountability Initiative.

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CKAN Roadmap goes public

Irina Bolychevsky - June 24, 2013 in ckan, contributing, News, Roadmap

Now that CKAN 2.0 is out, what should the next direction be for CKAN? New features, easier customisation, more data previews, UI tweaks… we’ve had plenty of ideas and suggestions, and we’d like you, the CKAN community, to help shape the direction and future of CKAN.

So, we’ve created a public CKAN Roadmap using Trello! CKAN is open source and there are lots of ways to get involved:

Prioritise features: see something you want? Vote it up (by clicking on the card and pressing the ‘vote’ button)!
Specify implementation: comment on a feature card with requirements, edge cases to consider or related work that exists.
Contribute code: Are you a coder working on something like one of these features? Let us know! Add a comment to the card, and e-mail the dev list.
Sponsor: See a feature listed you’d really like in CKAN, but don’t have the skills to implement yourself? You can sponsor the feature by paying for the developer time needed to create it. Just, write to info[at]ckan.org or using our contact form.
Suggest: Is there some great feature that you can’t see on the roadmap? Add it to our github wiki page and kickstart a discussion on the discussion list.

About the roadmap

On the roadmap, you’ll find four columns of cards:

Ideas / requests: there are lots of ideas that have been put forward. Which of them would you find most valuable?
Backlog: These are things we plan to work on, but haven’t started yet.
In progress: Stuff our developers are working on at the moment.
Done: These are features that have recently been developed and will appear in a release of CKAN soon. Click on a card to see more details.

For actual bugs and issues, it is still best to report them on our github issue tracker. For general Q&A please use stackoverflow or drop a note to our open community dev list.

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U.S. government’s data portal Data.gov relaunched on CKAN

Irina Bolychevsky - May 23, 2013 in ckan, ckan 2.0, data.gov, Deployments, News, Open Source, Releases

Today, we are excited to announce that our work with the US Federal Government (data.gov) has gone live at catalog.data.gov! You can also read the announcement from the data.gov blog with their description of the new catalog.

The Open Knowledge Foundation’s Services team, which deploys CKAN, have been working hard on a new unified catalog to replace the numerous previously existing catalogs of data.gov. All geospatial and raw data is federated into a single portal where data from different portals, sources and catalogs is displayed in a beautiful standardized user interface allowing users to search, filter and facet through thousands of datasets.

This is a key part of the U.S. meeting their newly announced Open Data Policy and marks data.gov’s first major step into open source. All the code is available on Github and data.gov plan to make their CKAN / Drupal set-up reusable for others as part of OGPL.

As one of the first major production sites to launch with the shiny new CKAN 2.0, data.gov takes advantage of the much improved information architecture, templating and distributed scalable authorization model. CKAN provides data.gov with a web interface for over 200 publishing organizations to manage their members, harvest sources and datasets – supporting requirements being outlined in Project Open Data. This means that agencies can maintain their data sources individually, schedule regular refreshes of the metadata into the central repository and manage an approval workflow.

There have been many additions to CKAN’s geospatial functionality, most notably a fast and elegant geospatial search:

We have added robust support for harvesting FGDC and ISO 19139 documents from WAFs, single spatial documents, CSW endpoints, ArcGIS portals, Z39:50 sources, ESRI Geoportal Servers as well as other CKAN catalogs. This is available for re-use as part of our harvesting and spatial extensions.

Most importantly, this is a big move towards greater accessibility and engagement with re-users. Not only is metadata displayed through a browsable web interface (instead of XML files), there is now a comprehensive CKAN API with access to all web functionality including search queries and downloads which respects user and publisher permission settings. Users can preview the data in graphic previews as well as exploring Web Map Services, whilst the dataset page provides context, browsable tags, dataset extent, and maintainers.

As data.gov invites users to get involved and provide feedback, we would also like to say that we are really excited about CKAN’s future. We have a very active mailing list, new documentation for installing CKAN and ways to contribute to the code for anyone wanting to join the CKAN community.

If you’re launching a CKAN portal soon or have one we don’t know about, let us know and we’ll make sure to add you to our wall of awesome!

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U.S. government’s data portal relaunched on CKAN

Irina Bolychevsky - May 23, 2013 in ckan, data.gov, Featured, News, Open Data, Open Source, Releases

There have been many additions to CKAN’s geospatial functionality, most notably a fast and elegant geospatial search:

If you’re launching a CKAN portal soon or have one we don’t know about, let us know and we’ll make sure to add you to our wall of awesome!

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CKAN 2.0 beta has arrived!

Irina Bolychevsky - February 27, 2013 in ckan 2.0, News, Releases

Work on what has become the 2.0 release started back in June last year when we decided that a more user friendly cleaner simpler CKAN was the next step to raise the profile and usefulness of open data portals. We went back to basics and redesigned the theme to focus on the core parts of CKAN: discoverability of data for end users and better data management tools for publishers. Instructions to install or upgrade are below and you can go play around with it on beta.ckan.org – just create an account to try out all the funcitonality. You’ll see a more engaging search page that highlights the use of facets and search result sorting as well as the keyword search; a redesigned dataset page showcasing resources, tags, activity streams and re-use of data (the “related” tab); a new multistep dataset registration process to guide publishers as well as a scalable authorization model for managing access rights to datasets (more info below under ‘Organisations’).

Highlights

Organisations

We’ve simplified the authorisation model for datasets. Previously a dataset was ‘owned’ by the user who added it to the portal – edit or admin access to the dataset had to be manually added one by one. This made it harder to distribute management of datasets for large portals with numerous publisher accounts for multiple publishing organizations (e.g. Departments or Agencies). In 2.0, by default, datasets always belong to an organisation (e.g. Department of Health, Office of National Statistics etc) and access rights are automatically allocated depending on the organisation access level members have. So if your department has 1 admin, 5 editors (add/edit/delete datasets, but no member management access) and 10 members (can see org private datasets, member, editor, admin accounts, but not add or edit anything) then any dataset that one of the editors adds will be editable by any of the other 4 editors or the admin.

Activity Streams

Datasets, users and groups now generate activity streams that can be ‘followed’.

Templating

We have switched our templating engine to use Jinja2, making it easier to customize CKAN. We’ve found this to be much more designer friendly and intuitive than Genshi. It’s also generally cleaner and renders faster. We’re also able to extend templates (for example by extensions) in a less invasive way than previously using the {% ckan_extends %} template tag. Note: Jinja2 templates do not support the IGenshiStreamFilter extension point, so extensions should either extend templates or provide template helper functions via the ITemplateHelpers extension point.

Installing or upgrading

This first beta release is aimed mainly at developers, and is only available via source install. You can refer to the “Install from Source” instructions or the “Upgrading a source install” sections on the documentation depending on your needs. In either case, make sure to point the repository to the 2.0 release branch (release-v2.0):

For first time source installs, in section 2b use:

pip install -e 'git+https://github.com/okfn/ckan.git@release-v2.0#egg=ckan'

For source install upgrades, in section 2 use:

git checkout release-v2.0

Note that this is a major version change and there are significant backwards incompatible changes, so if you are upgrading an existing instance make sure to backup your database before trying to upgrade it. Our supported extensions are currently being upgraded, and the degree of support for CKAN 2.0b varies depending on the extension. If you are using custom extensions on your instance, it is likely that you will need some work to upgrade them to 2.0. We are working on new documentation explaining how to upgrade from 1.X to 2.0, but in meantime to test this beta release we recommend disabling all extensions and enabling them one by one to see which ones will require updating. In case of doubt, feel free to send an email to the mailing list or ask on the IRC channel. As with all beta releases, you are bound to find bugs or things that need improvement. We are still working on the proper stable release, and collecting all pending issues on this milestone on GitHub Issues: https://github.com/okfn/ckan/issues?milestone=1&state=open We would love to hear any feedback and bug reports, feel free to send them to the mailing list or add an issue to GitHub.

What’s coming next

We’re now working on a dataset approval workflow for moving datasets from private to public state as well as support for bulk actions and harvesting management interfaces. We’ll also be adding tweaks and improvements as people use the beta and provide feedback, as well as activity stream support for organisations.

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Join CKAN team for Open Government Platform (OGPL) webinar, 19-20th December

Irina Bolychevsky - December 19, 2012 in Events, News

The CKAN team will be joining a webinar on the Open Government Platform (OGPL), an open source platform for open data and open government. Jeanne Holme, Evangelist for Data.gov writes:

We’ve been working hard on the Open Government Platform (OGPL), an open source capability for open data and open government around the world. This has been an active collaboration with the National Infomatics Centre of the Government of India and the US Government Data.gov team. The decision to move to an open source platform has been both challenging and rewarding. As with any open source capability, the code is only as strong as the community around it. We are getting close to releasing the first complete package of OGPL and would like to get your ideas, feedback, and commits before we proceed. To help with this, we will be holding two information webinars this week (Wednesday and Thursday, December 19 and 20, 2012), and have updated the code and documentation on Github.

We’re delighted that CKAN will be part of the OGPL (watch this space for further details!). An agenda and further details for how to join the calls are available here.

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