Jeffrey Yasskin

Live-blog of Governing Knowledge Commons

This thread was originally published from https://hachyderm.io/@jyasskin/113304004085955373 to https://hachyderm.io/@jyasskin/113371771545624084. I did not finish this book.

Governing Knowledge Commons by Frischmann, Madison & Strandburg is next in my attempt to figure out if the idea of a commons can help us keep the Web going. Many of the chapters are available online, so I’ll try to link to them as I start reading them. I may skip around to the chapters that look most relevant to the Web, and I’ll probably skip the paywalled chapters.

See also the previous thread on Governing the Commons. [Original]

I’m a little skeptical of the editors here, since they’re law professors and might be overly focused on how commons theory affects just intellectual property law. Chapter 1 section II A does focus on IP law, and while IP law is the way the largest sanctions are applied on the Web, much more of our regulation uses sub-legal methods like robots.txt and Javascript paywalls. [Original]

“Legal limitations on intellectual property rights support the possibility of constructing commons governance arrangements that allow resources to be used in ways that generate spillovers”, in section II B, is an interesting statement. Legal limitations allow more free-riding, or, equivalently, inflexibly require certain kinds of spillovers. They limit the variety of institutions that it’s possible to create, but perhaps ensure that the institutions are good? [Original]

Section IV A: “Unlike commons in the natural resource environment, knowledge commons arrangements usually must create a governance structure within which participants not only share existing resources but also engage in producing those resources and, indeed, in determining their character.”

I’d been thinking that the Web, at least, might have a 2-sided commons shape, where authors rely on users as a resource system, and users rely on authors as a resource system. We’ll see if I’m close. [Original]

“Inevitably, the intellectual products of past and contemporary “producers” (creators, inventors, innovators, thinkers, and the like) serve as inputs into later productive activities.”

This reminds me of how the fish in a fishery have children that are the fish in the future of that fishery. The analogy won’t be exact, but that kinda implies that the people claiming IP rights over their own ideas are the appropriators who can overexploit the commons. [Original]

“the nonrivalrous and nonexcludable knowledge resources that make up the cultural environment …”

Ideas themselves are non-rivalrous, but as @luis_in_brief pointed out in https://blog.tidelift.com/resilient-open-commons, other parts of a knowledge commons can be, like the maintainers’ time. Other rivalrous parts might be potential readers’ time/attention and download and other hosting costs. [Original]

Oops, 2 paragraphs later: “the nonrivalry of knowledge and information resources often rides on top of various rivalrous inputs (such as time or money) and may provide a foundation for various rivalrous outputs (such as money or fame)” [Original]

“The property scholar Carol Rose emphasizes the role of narratives, especially of origin stories, in explaining features of property regimes that are not determinable strictly on theoretical or functional grounds, particularly if one assumes that everyone begins from a position of rational self-interest.”

This is interesting and, I think, good: Governing the Commons, from 1990, never let itself model incompletely-rational actors, but humans are never completely rational. [Original]

The next section, IV B, goes through a list of questions to answer when doing a case study of a knowledge commons. I see at https://knowledge-commons.net/research-framework/ that they’ve added some questions, so I’ll try to answer those too. Note that these are one person’s sense with limited thought. It’d be nice to get someone to write an actual paper about this based on real research (or to read one that’s already been written, but I don’t see one linked from the knowledge commons site). [Original]

Background Environment: “What is the background context (legal, cultural, etc.) of this particular commons?”

The Web comes out of the Internet and a particular research group at CERN (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web). Its architects inherited and still have a deep sense that it should first and foremost be good for the world (https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/). However, as it’s grown to billions of users, its users have become as diverse in their motivations as the world. [Original]

“What normative values are relevant for this community?”

https://www.w3.org/TR/ethical-web-principles/ covers this for the people designing the core technology, but, for example, some sub-communities value profit or political control over ethics. [Original]

“What is the “default” status of the resources involved in the commons (patented, copyrighted, open, or other)?”

Copyright covers basically everything on the Web, but there’s a strong emphasis on fair use, letting search engines build indices, browsers transform content in lots of ways, and the Internet Archive archives everything. robots.txt and paywalls are interesting exceptions to the tradition of openness. [Original]

“How does this community fit into a larger context? What relevant domains overlap in this context?”

Well! The Web is part of the Internet, which has its own traditions. It’s highly influential on global politics and the economy, leading to lots of (recent?) interest from traditional power structures.

I’m not sure what this research tradition means by “domains”: we’ve got entertainment, news, socializing, commerce, propaganda, and probably a bunch more. [Original]

I’m going to take the questions under “Attributes [of the commons]” out of order, and start with the ones about the Community Members. So, “Who are the community members and what are their roles?”

We can start with the Priority of Constituencies: “users over authors over implementors over specifiers over theoretical purity”. That gives us 4 kinds of community members, translating “implementors” into “browsers” and ignoring “theoretical purity” as not a kind of person. [Original]

I’ll drop “specifiers” as a kind of community member too: we (I’m a specifier) design the rules for how the browsers and authors interact, but we’re generally representatives of one of those groups. That is, I think we’re a governing body, and our place in the Priority reflects an ideal of servant leadership. [Original]

In principle, the browsers are “user agents”. That is, they’re supposed to be strictly servants of the users, and so maybe we could ignore them as members of the community too. In practice, while I think they’ve done a pretty good job of being faithful agents, they need a lot of funding (~$500M/year if Mozilla is representative) and could make a lot of money by exploiting users’ reliance on them. So I think we have to model them and whatever forces are policing their behavior. [Original]

What other kinds of community members do we have? Search Engines deserve a place, with their role of helping users find authors.

Advertising Networks, with their role of getting users to fund everyone else without noticing it.

What about Social Networks or Framework Authors? Should we distinguish Content Authors (the humans) from the Publishers/Distributors/Aggregators who connect them to users?

And do we need to account at this level for Google playing significantly in 3 of the roles? [Original]

Leaving those questions unanswered, I’ll focus on Users, Authors, Browsers, Search, and AdTech as the community members for now.

“What are the degree and nature of openness with respect to each type of community member and the general public?”

[Original]

“What noncommunity members are impacted?”

Probably everyone is affected, either by critical services being more easily available over the Web, or by neighbors’ beliefs coming from websites. [Original]

Now back to exploring the Resources in the Web Commons, from the perspective of each kind of community member:

“What resources are pooled and how are they created or obtained?” … [Original]

Resources for Users: “Accessible” websites are the most obvious. “Accessible” in both the WCAG sense and in the sense that if you can’t find a site or can’t afford to pay to find out if it’s worth accessing, it’s not accessible.

Deeper resources might be: true information, entertainment, and “third places”.

In the dawn of the Web, users would write their own pages curating these resources and share them with each other. Since the advent of good Search, most users have stopped doing that. [Original]

Resources for Authors: I think “User Attention” works as a general description. Some authors want to turn that attention into money, either by selling it to advertisers, or selling access to their own website, but other authors want to convince people of things or change behavior or just feel a connection.

Attention is “created” by attracting users to spend more time on the Web, by showing that the Web is a productive “hunting ground”. It’s rivalrous and non-excludable. [Original]

Resources for Search Engines: Search Engines link Users and Authors, and so their resources are the union of the two? What else might be specific to search engines?

https://commoncrawl.org/ comes to mind: Engines with fewer resources than Google can share the work of crawling the web.

Bing has mentioned that it needs click data to improve its ranking to Google’s level. I don’t know of a commons emerging around that data, but I could imagine it happening.

What else could Search share? [Original]

Resources for Browsers: Same as Users, plus what?

Browsers need revenue to fund their development, and so far that all comes from deals to send searches to Google. (Except Edge which sends them to another Search Engine.) I’m not sure this is exactly a shared resource, but it’s a shared problem.

Browsers (and Authors) also share the standards bodies (like the W3C, WHATWG, Khronos, etc.) that they use to agree on new features. [Original]

Resources for Advertising: This sub-community needs user attention, specifically from users who aren’t fed up enough with ads to block them, and (for some ads) who they know enough about to target. This commons is being overexploited, as advertisers haven’t found a way to coordinate enough to avoid annoying users into installing ad blockers.

AdTech also needs a community of entities who want to advertise, but I’m having trouble seeing that as a commons… [Original]

“What are the characteristics of the resources? Are they rival or nonrival, tangible or intangible? Is there shared infrastructure?”

[Original]

[Original]

“What is personal information relative to resources in this action arena?”

(This question might not be a general part of the framework and just an artifact of the fact that Privacy As Commons was the last to update it.)

Generally information about Users counts as personal information, unless it’s sufficiently aggregated, and information about the other actors isn’t personal information. Cross-author (site) personal information is newly considered sketchy. [Original]

“What are considered to be appropriate resource flows? How is appropriateness of resource use structured or protected?”

There are probably other interesting details here. [Original]

“What technologies and skills are needed to create, obtain, maintain, and use the resources?”

The masses of Users and Authors don’t need many skills; their shared infrastructure (browsers, hosting providers, and adtech) provide access, and, to the extent anyone does it, handle the work of maintaining the resource pools. The infrastructure is made of software and consensus-building. [Original]

Digression: the book says “Some knowledge commons deploy IP rights to solve collective action, coordination, or transactions cost problems that exist apart from IP rights and perhaps would not be solvable without these rights (e.g., IP might be essential to facilitating collective action).” and lists open source and standards as examples of this. I strongly disagree: the IP rights get in the way, if anything, especially for standards. [Original]

Chandler Carruth started an interesting sub-thread at this point:

@jyasskin For standards, yes, but IMO because they take the fundamentally wrong approach to IP rights.

Standards (IME, and it’s narrow so maybe there are standards bodies that are diff / better) typically try to take a weirdly “neutral” stance on IP rights — requiring that they aren’t “used” or “held” or some such.

IMO, open source is much better at this — actively forcing a legal agreement to claim and then reciprocally share IP rights to create commons IP rights.

I’m bogging down a bit, so I’m going to start skipping through the questions as I see ones with interesting answers.

The “Goals and Objectives” questions seem to mostly have obvious answers, so I’m probably missing something. People want to be able to keep getting the Resources mentioned above, but taking too much can threaten the viability of whoever’s providing the resource. New technology (LLMs) and changes in the balance of power can threaten the system’s sustainability. [Original]

And that’s as far as I got.