Under a Strong Privacy Law, the ACCESS Act Promises a Vibrant, Decentralized Web
In June, US House lawmakers released a package of bills that intend to curb the monopolies of Big Tech platforms. The bills, although not yet finalized for a House Floor vote, are pioneering in scope and depth; the regulations seek to stimulate competition among digital platforms through bans on behavior such as self-preferencing and leveraging market power over several business lines.
From the perspective of user experience, one act, in particular, has exciting, transformative potential: the ACCESS Act. The linchpin of the ACCESS Act is mandating interoperability among large online platforms.
Interoperability is as intuitive as it is absent from the market-dominating stranglehold of companies like Facebook. Interoperability dictates that platforms and third-party apps can interface through mechanisms like APIs so that users on different platforms can smoothly interact with each other.
Interoperability functions seamlessly in many aspects of daily life. A Verizon customer can call an AT&T customer, and a Gmail user can email an AOL user, without any information being lost in translation.
Importantly, under interoperability, a user can move from one platform to another while maintaining their social network. If Facebook 2.0 arises, a user can port their data from Facebook to Facebook 2.0 without losing any connections. They are still able to see Facebook posts and communicate with their Facebook friends, all while transferring their content onto Facebook 2.0 and taking it down from Facebook.
The success of social networking platforms like Facebook rests on the robustness of their social graph. The more users on a platform, the better for the users. This phenomenon, which economists dub network effects, creates a slippery slope to monopolization: smaller competitors face severe barriers to entry because of their lack of a large user base.
Interoperability could eliminate these barriers. A new platform can entice users by the quality and novelty of its services without worrying about user switching costs, wherein users lose their previous connections and profiles. A common technical standard paired with interoperability regulations will allow any user on participating platforms to see content (posts, comments, videos, etc.) in a basic form; any further specs, like content themes, ad settings, and speech guidelines, will be up to the individual platform to design.
Interoperability lets the imagination run free. Upon the ACCESS Act’s release, tech activist and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow wrote a speculative short story that envisions a world where interoperability adopts its best form.
Nur is a comic book creator who faces daily, debilitating harassment on Twitter, but the platform is necessary for Nur’s livelihood and career prospects. She discovers Gotham Clock Tower, a “private baby twitter” full of other women comic creators, that has interoperability with Twitter but rules of its own regarding speech:
“Finding Gotham Clock Tower was like tunneling under the wall around Main Twitter and emerging into a garden paradise. The other women there were incredibly supportive and kind, and they had all kinds of extra features in the service, like the ability to bud off private channels that weren’t pushed out to Main Twitter and its satellites.”
Despite the sea of opportunity that interoperability promises, the endeavor poses a critical threat at the intersection of privacy and platform economies. In any regulation that promotes competition, critical questions include competition for what and for whose benefit. Here, the answer depends in part on regulations concerning the privacy of user data. Interoperability opens the floodgates for vast amounts of sensitive consumer data to travel from platform to platform. If platforms begin to compete for this data, without a robust legal standard for privacy protection, privacy will become a commodity rather than a human right.
The ACCESS Act features a non-commercialization clause which prevents platforms from using ported data without explicit user consent and for purposes apart from interoperability, like targeted advertising; however, interoperability is not defined in the bill–or, more importantly, what is not under the purview of interoperability is not specified. This vagueness means that platforms could co-opt the term to support business models that exploit people’s digital footprints and disrespect privacy, as long as they obtain user consent.
A nascent platform’s business model could offer a discount on your Spotify premium subscription if you agree to port your Facebook data over to its platform, where the data could be used in shady surveillance tactics. As long as the user agrees, the platform could argue that their business model requires the data to be used in this way–a kind of prerequisite for interoperability. Another platform may be offering privacy as a feature of a more expensive, premium subscription. Yet another ill-conceived data monetization strategy is data dividends, where consumers would be paid small sums for their data. In these pay-for-privacy scenarios, privacy and personal data become commodities for which companies compete vigorously. Only those who can afford privacy, and those who care enough to read the fine print, will be spared from surveillance.
These practices might only be perpetuated under interoperability and data portability, unless lawmakers push a robust federal privacy standard. Now, there is a sparse collection of federal acts governing online information collection–like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and Health Insurance Portability and Accounting Act–and a small assemblage of stronger state privacy laws, like the California Consumer Privacy Act. A comprehensive federal privacy law could mandate explicit consent around any data collection, retention, and processing, and ban use of data that monetizes people’s attention and clicks. Data collection with an underlying incentive for profit, surveillance, or profiling could be prohibited. The law would foster a digital ecosystem designed to be private, rather than one where privacy is a rare or expensive added feature.
In addition to more privacy-aware options, one of the larger goals of de-monopolizing the Web is to encourage a notion called digital self-determination, where users have autonomy and agency in their digital lives, including the freedom to control their online identity, expression, and participation. Working towards this ideal involves establishing a privacy law that will put an end to surveillance capitalism, under which even the most seemingly innocuous traces of data are used to predict people’s identities and behavior. Data portability, as dictated in the ACCESS Act’s plan for interoperability, is another key to empowering users to understand and control how their data is used. Finally, the original version of the ACCESS Act from 2019 included delegability, mandating that large platforms create interfaces for third-party developers and users to build on the main platform infrastructure; this would allow other entities to manage users’ interactions with the platform. Adding this feature, or some version of it, back into the bill would be a meaningful step towards a more decentralized and open-source Web, where users can shape their digital destinies. Paired with interoperability and a robust privacy law, these regulations promise a Web without monopolization and profit-incentivized data collection, and instead with thriving alcoves like the Gotham Clock Tower, myriad choices respecting human rights, and collective, user-driven innovation.
Gina Markov is a rising senior at Yale University pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics. Gina is passionate about bridging technology, policy, and ethics, and she is spending the summer as an intern for the Lumen database, doing work related to privacy, copyright, and online speech. In her free time, she enjoys long distance running and hiking, and explores interests in science fiction, antitrust, and francophone literature.
