Robin Berjon

@vanderbeeken@mastodon.online @Marloezovic@mastodon.nl @_elena@mastodon.social @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu It does look like a conservative push to eliminate pseudonymity online.

If the nonprofit doesn't get the funds MIT owes us, we will progressively have to start transferring Members in the Americas to the other hosts in the EU, Japan, and China. I'd be curious to see the face of US officials when they find out that American companies now have to participate in Web governance abroad. The geopolitics of standards are… interesting.

At any rate, creative ideas to fix this situation are welcome. The Board is continuing to work towards a solution. I just thought that the Web community should know where things stand. I'll keep you posted.

At this point it looks like we will not have an operational W3C nonprofit on Jan 1. Every Director will vote their conscience, but it seems likely that the asset transfer will be rejected, leaving MIT responsible for its contracts with W3C Members (for which they have paid). No one knows what happens then.

We are actively figuring out how to re-hire the W3C/MIT staff so that we can continue operating in the new year. I think the fact that MIT is holding people's jobs hostage over the holidays isn't lost on anyone.

MIT clearly appears to be negotiating with the expectation that they can get away with whatever, and with no care for the consequences. On November 17 we saw terms that were unfair in that they made W3C carry the cost of MIT’s questionable accounting practices and failed to honour prior agreements, but that came with sufficient funds to support the continuation of W3C Inc.

Yesterday, the Board learnt that the financial balance that MIT is offering is actually much worse than previously stated due to additional liabilities that MIT has only just informed us of. Except with a drastic reduction in staff, W3C would not have enough money to make it to the end of January based on the proposed agreement. And even then it would be unlikely to make it through Q1.

Right before the Board's December 10-12 meeting, we received a draft contract from MIT with a worse offer. It transferred liabilities much higher than the assets that came with and significantly decreased the funds that W3C would receive. This jeopardised the Consortium’s viability but we sought to continue negotiating in good faith and looked for options to accelerate revenue to avoid cash flow issues.

@Edent So, I 100% agree with you that both Google and browser-centricity are serious problems that we need to solve; however that doesn't mean that everything that goes wrong is Google's fault :) In this case, having been on the inside, I don't think it is. It took a lot of mistakes to get us to this point. Happy to colour in details, but I'd need to start drinking…

@cdub @Edent This doesn't mean that I can't collaborate with Googlers when we're aligned on a smaller goal and in fact I believe that I do, on generally friendly terms. It also doesn't mean that I don't respect you or other Googlers. We do, however, disagree very strongly about either what the values of an open society are or about how to go about implementing them.

@slightlyoff @Edent My mental model is more like: use browser+OS to boost search, use search+OS to boost browser. This is evidently a very problematic market structure. I don't think that it's Google's doing, but W3C isn't doing its job when it's not working on addressing this problem.

@nygren Thanks for offering! A week ago I would've said "make sure you pay your invoices" but right now I don't know. We'll keep the AC posted. Ideas are welcome!

@cdub @Edent I appreciate that you didn't put me last; I hope you put someone else first though! I didn't mean to imply existence; only behaviour. I have zero problems with G's existence, plenty of nice folks there and a handful of decent products I use. I'm not a big fan of big corporations in general, but if they behave OK then I have more pressing problems.

@slightlyoff @Edent After spending some time in policy circles, I really don't think that it's an either/or. Standards alone won't make the fix, but they are needed for certain interventions to become possible.

@cdub @Edent That means that G is a problem that the W3C (and broader Web community) needs to solve. And just having some sort of value does nothing, what matters is what we do about it. Eg. one of the big drivers of concentration is the browser/search feedback loop. I'd love to be wrong, but I suspect that it'll be hard for you to work with me on fixing that. Hence my mention of disagreement over implementation.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri The easy example of this is AMP. If this had been produced by some kind of elected governing body for search, we'd all be expecting them to be kicked out. But not only is the responsible "party" still there, the specific people who caused that harm didn't face any consequences for it. I'm not (at all) saying that we should have an electoral system, just that if key parts of the Web have the accountability of post-Brexit Britain, it's a problem!

@abr @slightlyoff @Edent Are you describing the WHATWG or the WICG there? Sorry, just being facetious — as I said, I don't think that that's what's happening here 😄

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri Agreed — I don't think that G is a supervillain and I have no interest in casting them as one. I was only trying to carefully explain why I thought that if you have

1. a serious structural problem,
2. that can be solved, and
3. that is exclusively or predominantly exploited by company X

then I reckon you can call it "an X problem" without it being a vow to obliterate X in any way. Y'all made the case that's unhelpful either way; I'll stop.

@cdub @michaelchampion Ok, I'm willing to hear that. We can agree on the problems and disagree on how to label them. Let me try this differently. Shipping browsers with a default search engine, often paid for, has a number of effects that are detrimental to people. It's a serious problem which we need to fix, including considering its impact on browser diversity. Is there someone on your end who'd be interested in working on that?

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri That does NOT mean that Googlers are evil, that G needs to be eliminated, that there is some evil plan, that G is controlling W3C, etc. Again, I'd *much* rather solve this with than to. It's not the first time that we have a runaway giant that needs to be kept in check. I don't think it's outrageous, unsubtle, radical, or disrespectful to point that out as one of the biggest and hardest problems that we need to solve.

@cdub I understand & appreciate that. If there's a way of discussing & solving these issues without either sticking to meaningless abstractions or wading into a legal minefield, I'm all for it.

@michaelchampion @cdub Right, that would be a pretty naive fix, if it could be called a fix at all. I think we can do significantly better than that, but I wasn't writing up solutions in this thread, just explaining the issues. There's a group of people interested in solving this, I think it'll be a lot easier to discuss with some degree of a concrete proposal.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri I didn't say that an elected body would have accepted it or not, just that if the people who made the decision to deploy AMP had been elected we'd have fired their asses. And your take on AMP is too generous. A group of us actually went to G with a proposal that would have kept AMP alive and helpful but removed the parts that only help G. They only sent lawyers to shut us down. There's zero room left to believe in good faith on that one, I'm sorry to report.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri Part 2, governance. At this kind of scale, what G does isn't just about quality but also governance. A nice property of governance systems is accountability. Again, sticking mostly to search since that was the example, I think that we have enough evidence of misgovernance (note that I'm not at all saying malicious, just bad) to expect accountability — but the browser/search feedback loop guarantees dominance so it just isn't possible.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri So, to conclude: looking at only one G thing (I could repeat this for a couple of other aspects) and taking the most G-friendly assumptions (no malice, product quality, natural monopoly) I still find issues with G behaviour/market structuring that are (IMHO) significant harms to the Web and society. I think it should be W3C's job to solve the Web's most pressing structural problems, and this is one of them.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri Part 3, societal impact. Search is an editorial ranking of content — in fact the editorial decisions are the whole point, it's supposed to be opinionated, not random. Having an excessively dominant source of editorial decision-making is unhealthy for a society. A dynamic like the browser/search feedback loop that mechanically leads to search concentration is a problem for society. Browser UX that favours generalist search over verticals makes this even worse.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri • I am also not saying anything about G's W3C participation. Overall I think that it's pretty positive. I would have different priorities but it's reasonable for people to have different takes there. • I would VERY much prefer to solve the problems we have WITH the G folks. I also don't want to get anyone in legal trouble. If that means the occasional closed doors/Chatham/safe harbour discussion, I'd be supportive.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri So — part 1, quality.

I'm not convinced that G search dominates due to "product quality" but for the sake of argument let's say it's true. Either of two things is possible:

1. Its market share more or less matches that which would result from superior quality under ideal market conditions, or
2. it doesn't.

If (1), then G should be insisting that browsers protect search competition because anything else would be a threat.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri I haven't proposed anything yet — I'm only explaining the position that we have a problem and need to take it seriously. I think that looking at search dominance as a natural outcome of unavoidable dynamics is too much of a "crime, boy, I don't know" take for my taste — especially when there's a clear mechanism supporting it that's right there! I also don't think Wu's point is "and therefore, do nothing about it."

@danbri Correct, neither you nor @cdub. But while I regret that you can't engage, I feel I owe you some details on why I think Google is a problem we need to solve all the same. @michaelchampion

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri If it is indeed the case, then that doesn't mean that it has to be nationalised. It could remain privately operated (and Google would still print a fuckload of money) but it would have to be governed differently, notably with a form of "infrastructure neutrality" in mind (that also helps with pt.3) and likely as an API to build on and not a site with a UI. Again, looking at it this way there is still a major issue (here of governance) to address.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri Part 4, concentration. Mike makes the point that the structure of search and network effects necessarily lead to what we have. I am less convinced but let's admit it. This takes us straight into a theory that search might be a natural monopoly (these aren't generally illegal, so this isn't an accusation). I'd want some solid evidence, but it's a theory that I think it worth considering.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri Note that I think that there are ways in which we could address that issue while retaining a dominant indexer (see also next part). It would require some form of opening up control over ranking to users. At any rate, worth solving for.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri Some rando like Musk could buy a browser and drive traffic away, or Apple could decide to pick a fight. Under dominance-from-quality assumptions, these are real strategic threats worth mitigating. In that case, let's all fix the browser/search model together. If (2), then given the centrality of search & browsers, we have a *serious* problem. Even just 5% of that income redistributed would be *huge* for Web vitality and innovation. So same fix!

@liaizon@social.wake.st @laurenshof@indieweb.social Be careful what you wish for.

@julienw @nhoizey Hahaha, je n'avais pas pensé au Puy mais c'est tellement juste.

@michaelchampion @cdub @danbri Yeah — why would it be managed by NGOs or the W3C? This is simply a question of removing anticompetitive mechanisms in the market for search. It doesn't require a distribution mechanism.