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An Approach to Paying for Everything That’s Free

January 28, 2024 / / 1 Comment

Prompt: “A public marketplace for digital goods where people pay whatever they please for everything they consume.” Via Microsoft Image Creator

Now that we’ve hit peak subscription, and paywalls are showing up in front of formerly free digital goods (requiring, of course, more subscriptions), perhaps the world is ready for EmanciPay, an idea that has been biding its time on our wiki since 2009.

So, rather than leave it buried there, we’ll surface it here. Dig:::

Overview

Simply put, Emancipay makes it easy for anybody to pay (or offer to pay) —

  1. as much as they like
  2. however they like
  3. for whatever they like
  4. on their own terms

— or at least to start with that full set of options, and to work out differences with sellers easily and with minimal friction.

Emancipay turns consumers (aka users) into customers by giving them a pricing gun (something which in the past only sellers used) and their own means to make offers, to pay outright, and to escrow the intention to pay when price and other requirements are met. And to be able to do this at scale across all sellers, much as cash, browsers, credit cards, and email clients do the same. Payments themselves can also be escrowed.

In slightly more technical terms, EmanciPay is a payment framework for customers operating with full agency in the open marketplace, and at scale. It operates on open protocols and standards, so it can be used by any buyer, seller or intermediary.

It was conceived as a way to pay for music, journalism, or what any artist brings into the world. But it can apply to anything. For example, [subscriptions], have become a giant fecosystem in which every seller has separate and non-substitutable scale across all subscribers, while subscribers have zero scale across all sellers, with the highly conditional exceptions of silo’d commercial intermediaries. As [Customer Commons] puts it,

There’s also not much help coming from the subscription management services we have on our side: Truebill, Bobby, Money Dashboard, Mint, Subscript Me, BillTracker Pro, Trim, Subby, Card Due, Sift, SubMan, and Subscript Me. Nor from the subscription management systems offered by Paypal, Amazon, Apple or Google (e.g. with Google Sheets and Google Doc templates). All of them are too narrow, too closed and exclusive, too exposed to the surveillance imperatives of corporate giants, and too vested in the status quo.

That status quo sucks (see here, or just look up “subscription hell”), and it’s way past time to unscrew it.) But how?

The better question is where?

The answer to that is on our side: the customer’s side.

While EmanciPay was first conceived by ProjectVRM as a way to make live payments to nonprofits and to provide a new monetization method for publishers. it also works as a counterpart to sellers’ subscription systems in what Zuora (a supplier of subscription management systems to the publishing industry, including The Guardian and Financial Times) calls the “subscription economy“, which it says “is built on ever-changing relationships with your customers”. Since relationships are two-way by nature, EmanciPay is one way that customers can manage their end, while publisher-side systems such as Zuora’s manage the other.

Emancipay economic case

EmanciPay provides a new form of economic signaling not available to individuals, either on the Net or before the Net became available as a communications medium. EmanciPay will use open standards and be comprised of open-source code. While any commercial fourth parties can use EmanciPay (or its principles, or any parts of it they like), EmanciPay’s open and standard framework will support fourth parties by making them substitutable, much as the open standards of email (SMTP, POP3, IMAP) make email systems substitutable. (Each has what Joe Andrieu calls service endpoint portability.)

EmanciPay is an instrument of customer independence from all of the billion (or so) commercial entities on the Net, each with its own arcane and siloed systems for engaging and managing customer relations, as well as receipt, acknowledgment, and accounting for payments from customers.

Use Case Background

EmanciPay was conceived originally as a way to provide customers with the means to signal interest and the ability to pay for media and creative works (most of which are freely available on the Web, if not always free of charge). Through EmanciPay, demand and supply can relate, converse, and transact business on mutually beneficial terms, rather than only on terms provided by the countless different siloed systems we have today, each serving to hold the customer captive, and causing much inconvenience and friction in the process.

Media goods were chosen for five reasons: 1) because most are available for free, even if they cost money, or are behind paywalls 2) paywalls, which are cookie-based, cannot relate to individuals as anything other than submissive and dependent parties (and each browser a users employs carries a different set of cookies) 3) both media companies and non-profits are constantly looking for new sources of revenue 4) the subscription model, while it creates steady income and other conveniences for sellers, is often a bad deal for customers, and is now so overused (see Subscriptification) that the world is approaching a peak subscription crisis, and unscrewing it can only happen from the customer’s side (because the business is incapable of unscrewing the problem itself 5) all methods of intermediating payment choices are either siloed by the seller or siloed by intermediators, discouraging participation by individuals.

What the marketplace requires are new business and social contracts that ease payment and stigmatize non-payment for creative goods. The friction involved in voluntary payment is still high, even on the Web, where one must go through complex ceremonies even to make simple payments. There is no common and easy way either to keep track of what media (free or otherwise) we use (see Media Logging), to determine what it might be worth, and to pay for it easily and in standard ways — to many different suppliers. (Again, each supplier has its own system for accepting payments.)

EmanciPay differs from other payment models (subscriptions, newsstands, tip jars) by providing customers with the ability to choose what they wish to pay and how they’ll pay it, with minimum friction — and with full choice about what they disclose about themselves.

EmanciPay will also support credit for referrals, requests for service, feedback, and other relationship support mechanisms, all at the control of the user. For example, EmanciPay can provide quick and easy ways for listeners to pay for public radio broadcasts or podcasts, for readers to pay for otherwise “free” papers or blogs, for listeners to pay to hear music and support artists, for users to issue promises of payment for stories or programs — all without requiring the individual to disclose unnecessary private information or to become a “member” — although these options are kept open.

This will scaffold genuine relationships between buyers and sellers in the media marketplace. It will also give deeper meaning to “membership” in non-profits. (Under the current system, “membership” generally means putting one’s name on a pitch list for future contributions, and not much more than that.)

EmanciPay will also connect the sellers’ CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems with customers’ VRM (Vendor Relationship Management) systems, supporting rich and participatory two-way relationships. In fact, EmanciPay will by definition be a VRM system.

Micro-accounting and Macro-distribution

The idea of “micro-payments” for goods on the Net has been around for a long time and is often brought up as a potential business model for journalism. For example in this article by Walter Isaacson in Time Magazine. It hasn’t happened, at least not globally, because it’s too complicated, and in prototype only works inside private silos.

What ProjectVRM suggests instead is something we don’t yet have, but very much need:

  1. micro-accounting for actual uses. Think of this simply as “keeping track of” the news, podcasts, newsletters, or music we consume.
  2. macro-distribution of payments for accumulated use (that’s no longer “micro”).

Much — maybe most — of the digital goods we consume are both free for the taking and worth more than $zero. How much more? We need to be able to say. In economic terms, demand needs to have a much wider range of signals it can give to supply. And give to each other, to better gauge what we should be willing to pay for free stuff that has real value but not a hard price.

As currently planned, EmanciPay would –

  1. Provide a single and easy way for consumers of “content” to become customers of it. In the current system — which isn’t one — every artist, every musical group, and every public radio and TV station has his, her or own way of taking in contributions from those who appreciate the work. This can be arduous and time-consuming for everybody involved. (Imagine trying to pay separately every musical artist you like, for all your enjoyment of each artist’s work.) What EmanciPay proposes, however, is not a replacement for existing systems, but a new system that can supplement existing fund-raising systems — one that can soak up much of today’s MLOTT: Money Left On The Table.
  2. Provide ways for individuals to look back through their media usage histories, inform themselves about what they have been enjoying, and determine how much it is worth to them. The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), and later the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), both came up with “rates and terms that would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller.” This almost absurd language first appeared in the 1995 Digital Performance Royalty Act (DPRA) and was tweaked in 1998 by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), under which both the CARP and the CRB operated. The rates they came up with peaked at $.0001 per “performance” (a song or recording), per listener. EmanciPay creates the “willing buyer” that the DPRA thought wouldn’t exist.
  3. Stigmatize non-payment for worthwhile media goods. This is where “social” will finally come to be something more than yet another tech buzzmodifier.

All these require micro-accounting, not micro-payments. Micro-accounting can inform ordinary payments that can be made in clever new ways that should satisfy everybody with an interest in seeing artists compensated fairly for their work. An individual listener, for example, can say “I want to pay 1¢ for every song I hear,” and “I’ll send SoundExchange a lump sum of all the pennies wish to pay for songs I have heard over a year, along with an accounting of what artists and songs I’ve listened to” — and leave dispersal of those totaled pennies up to the kind of agency that likes, and can be trusted, to do that kind of thing. That’s the macro-distribution part of the system.

Similar systems can also be put in place for readers of newspapers, blogs, and other journals. What’s important is that the control is in the hands of the individual and that the accounting and dispersal systems work the same way for everybody.

VRM + AI? A question for VRM Day on October 9

September 23, 2023 / / 0 Comments

A VRM Day at Harvard Law School in 2008

We’ve been in an uphill fight to empower people—customers—in online markets where the prevailing belief is that captive customers are more valuable than free ones. (The value of free customers is well-understood, though not always respected, in offline markets.) And we’ve been in this fight for more than seventeen years.

But now AI is all the craze.

Question: Can AI help VRM? And vice versa?

Think about what would happen if people had their own AI systems, working for them and not for companies whose business is selling you something (e.g. Amazon), pushing advertising at you (e.g. Google), or trapping you in their walled garden (e.g. Apple)? Why not have our own AI, to help us make better sense of our contacts, our calendars, our health, financial, property, travel, and other kinds of data? And then, when the need arises, have our personal AI help us make well-informed decisions about what to buy, how, and where, without being biased by marketers and their bots on the other side?

Those are just a few questions we’ll be visiting two Mondays from now, October 9, at VRM Day in the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The time frame will be 9am to 4pm. There is also plenty of parking (the Museum is otherwise closed on Mondays).

We’ll visit other questions that come up, of course. And participants with something to show off are free to do that as well. And some will, especially with IIW happening the following three days, also at the Computer History Museum.

Registering here isn’t necessary, but it helps to have a head count.

See you there!

Toward better buy ways

August 23, 2022 / / 0 Comments

For sixteen years, ProjectVRM has encouraged the development of tools and services that solve business problems from the customer side. This work is toward testing a theory: that free customers are more valuable—to themselves and to the businesses they engage—than captive ones. That theory can only be tested when tools for doing that are in place.

We already have some of those tools. Our big four in the digital world are the browser, the phone, email, and texting. In the analog offline world, our best model is cash. From The Cash Model of Customer Experience:

Here’s the handy thing about cash: it gives customers scale. It does that by working the same way for everybody, everywhere it’s accepted. It’s also anonymous by nature, meaning it carries no personal identifiers. Recording what happens with it is also optional, because using it doesn’t require an entry in a ledger (as happens with cryptocurrencies). Cash has also been working this way for thousands of years. But we almost never talk about our “experience” with cash, because we don’t need to.

The problem with our four personal digital tools—browser, phone, email and texting—is that they are not fully ours. So our agency is at best compromised. Specifically,

  1. The most popular browsers are also agents of Apple, Google, Microsoft, plus countless thousands of third parties inserting cookies and other tracking instruments into our devices.
  2. Our phones are not just ours. They are corporate tentacles of Apple and Google, lined with countless personal data suction cups from unknown surveillance systems. (For more on this, see Apple vs (or plus) Adtech, Part I and Part II.)
  3. Apple and Google together supply 87% of all email software and services. Apple promises privacy, while Google makes a business out of knowing the contents of your messages, plus every other Google-provided or -involved piece of software reveals to the company about your life. As for how well Apple delivers on its privacy promises, look up apple+compromised+privacy.
  4. The original messaging service for phones, SMS, is owned and run by phone companies. Other major messaging, texting and chat services are run entirely by private companies.
  5. Among common Internet activities, only email and browsing are based on open and simple standards. The main ones are SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 for email, and HTTP/S for browsing. Those share the Internet’s three NEA virtues: Nobody owns them, Everybody can use them, and Anybody can improve them.

This is important: If a product or service mostly works for some company, it’s not yours. You are a user or a consumer. You are not a customer; nor are you operating with full agency in a truly free market. So, while it is obvious that all of us are made more valuable to business, and to ourselves, because we use browsers, phones, email, and messaging, we can’t say that we are free while we do.

But the Internet is still young: dating in its current form—supportive of e-commerce—since 30 April 1995, when the NSFNET (one of the Internet’s backbones) was decommissioned, and its policy forbidding commercial traffic on its pipes no longer stood in the way. The Net will also be with us for dozens or hundreds of decades to come, with its base protocol, TCP/IP, continuing to support freedom for every node on it.

More importantly, there are many business problems best or only solved from the customer side. Here is a list:

  1. Identity. Logins and passwords are burdensome leftovers from the last millennium. There should be (and already are) better ways to identify ourselves by revealing to others only what we need them to know. Working on this challenge is the SSI—Self-Sovereign Identity—movement.  (Which also goes by many other names. The latest is Web5.) The solution here for individuals is tools of their own that scale. Note that there is a LOT happening here. One good way keep up with it is in the Identisphere newsletter.  You can also participate by attending the twice-yearly Internet Identity Workshop, which has been going strong since 2005.
  2. Subscriptions. Nearly all subscriptions are pains in the butt. “Deals” can be deceiving, full of conditions and changes that come without warning. New customers often get better deals than loyal customers. And there are no standard ways for customers to keep track of when subscriptions run out, need renewal, or change. The only way this can be normalized is from the customers’ side.
  3. Terms and conditions. In the world today, nearly all of these are ones that companies proffer; and we have little or no choice about agreeing to them. Worse, in nearly all cases, the record of agreement is on the company’s side. Oh, and since the GDPR came along in Europe and the CCPA in California, entering a website has turned into an ordeal typically requiring “consent” to privacy violations the laws were meant to stop. Or worse, agreeing that a site or a service provider spying on us is a “legitimate interest.” The solution here is terms individuals can proffer and organizations can agree to. The first of these is #NoStalking, and allows a publisher to do all the advertising they want, so long as it’s not based on tracking people. Think of it as the opposite of an ad blocker. (Customer Commons is also involved in the IEEE’s P7012 Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms.
  4. Payments. For demand and supply to be truly balanced, and for customers to operate at full agency in an open marketplace (which the Internet was designed to support), customers should have their own pricing gun: a way to signal—and actually pay willing sellers—as much as they like, however, they like, for whatever they like, on their own terms. There is already a design for that, called EmanciPay. Its promise for the music industry alone is enormous.
  5. Intentcasting. Advertising is all guesswork, which involves massive waste. But what if customers could safely and securely advertise what they want, and only to qualified and ready sellers? This is called intentcasting, and to some degree, it already exists. Toward this, the Intention Byway is a core focus of Customer Commons. (Also see a list of intentcasting providers on the ProjectVRM Development Work list.)
  6. Shopping. Why can’t you have your own shopping cart—that you can take from store to store? Because we haven’t invented one yet. But we can. And when we do, all sellers are likely to enjoy more sales than they get with the current system of all-silo’d carts.
  7. Internet of Things. We don’t have this yet. Instead, we have the Apple of things, the Amazon of things, the Google of things, the Samsung of things, the Sonos of things, and so on, each silo’d in separate systems we don’t control. Things we own on the Internet should be our things. We should be able to control them, as independent operators, as we do with our computers and mobile devices. (Also, by the way, things don’t need to be intelligent or connected to belong to the Internet for us to control what’s known about them. They can be, or have, picos.)
  8. Loyalty. All loyalty programs are gimmicks, and coercive. True loyalty is worth far more to companies than the coerced kind, and only customers are in a position to truly and fully express it. We should have our own loyalty programs, to which companies are members, rather than the reverse.
  9. Privacy. We’ve had privacy tech in the physical world since the inventions of clothing, shelter, locks, doors, shades, shutters, and other ways to limit what others can see or hear—and to signal to others what’s okay and what’s not. Instead, all we have are unenforced promises by others not to watch our naked selves, or to report what they see to others. Or worse, coerced urgings to “accept” spying on us and distributing harvested information about us to parties unknown, with no record of what we’ve agreed to.
  10. Customer service. There are no standard ways for customers and companies to enjoy relationships, with useful data flowing both ways, and for help to come when it’s needed. Instead, every company does it differently, in its own silo’d system. For more on this, see # 12 below.
  11. Regulatory compliance. Especially around privacy. Because really, all the GDPR and the CCPA want is for companies to stop spying on people. Without any privacy tech on the individual’s side, however, responsibility for everyone’s privacy is entirely a corporate burden. This is unfair to people and companies alike, as well as insane—because it can’t work. (Worse, nearly all B2B “compliance” solutions only solve the felt need by companies to obey the letter of a law while ignoring its spirit. But if people have their own ways to signal their privacy requirements and expectations (as they do with clothing and shelter in the natural world), life gets a lot easier for everybody, because there’s something there to respect. We don’t have that yet online, but it shouldn’t be hard. For more on this, see Privacy is Personal and our own Privacy Manifesto.
  12. Real relationships: ones in which both parties actually care about and help each other, and good market intelligence flows both ways. Marketing by itself can’t do it. All you get is the sound of one hand slapping. (Or, more typically, pleasuring itself with mountains of data and fanciful maths first described in Darrell Huff’s How to Lie With Statistics, written in 1954). Sales departments can’t do it either, because their job is done once the relationship is established. CRM can’t do it without a VRM hand to shake on the customer’s side. From What Makes a Good Customer: “Consider the fact that a customer’s experience with a product or service is far more rich, persistent and informative than is the company’s experience selling those things, or learning about their use only through customer service calls (or even through pre-installed surveillance systems such as those which for years now have been coming in new cars). The curb weight of customer intelligence (knowledge, know-how, experience) with a company’s products and services far outweighs whatever the company can know or guess at. So, what if that intelligence were to be made available by the customer, independently, and in standard ways that work at scale across many or all of the companies the customer deals with?”
  13. Any-to-any/many-to-many business: a market environment where anybody can easily do business with anybody else, mostly free of centralizers or controlling intermediaries (with due respect for inevitable tendencies toward federation). There is some movement in this direction around what’s being called Web3.
  14. Life management platforms. KuppingerCole has been writing and thinking about these since not long after they gave ProjectVRM an award for its work, way back in 2007. These have gone by many labels: personal data clouds, vaults, dashboards, cockpits, lockers, and other ways of characterizing personal control of one’s life where it meets and interacts with the digital world. The personal data that matters in these is the kind that matters in one’s life: health (e.g. HIEofOne), finances, property, subscriptions, contacts, calendar, creative works, and so on, including personal archives for all of it. Social data out in the world also matters, but is not the place to start, because that data is less important than the kinds of personal data listed above—most of which has no business being sold or given away for goodies from marketers. (See We can do better than selling our data.)

All of these, however, are ocean-boiling ideas. In other words, not easy, especially without what the military calls “robust funding.” So our strategies are best aimed toward what are called “blue” rather than “red” (blood filled) oceans. One of those is the Byway (or “buyway”) project by Customer Commons, in Bloomington, Indiana. An excerpt:

There are three parts to the Byway project as it now stands (in July 2022): an online community (Small Town/mastodon), a matcher tool (Intently), and a local e-commerce “buyway.” (For more on that one, download the slide deck presented by Doc and Joyce at The Mill in November 2021. Or download this earlier and shorter one.)

We also see the Byway as complementary to, rather than competitive with, developments with similar and overlapping ambitions, such as SSI, DIDcomm, picos, JLINC, Digital Homesteading / Dazzle and many others.

Joyce and I, both founders and board members of Customer Commons, are heading up to DWeb Camp in a few minutes, and plan to make progress there on Byway development. I’ll report here on progress.

[Later…] DWeb Camp was a great success for us. We are now in planning conversations with developers and others. Stay tuned for more on that.

At last, a protocol to connect VRM and CRM

August 18, 2016 / / 0 Comments

person-entity

We’ve been waiting a long time for a protocol to connect VRM (customers’ Vendor Relationship Management) with CRM (vendors’ Customer Relationship Management).

Now we have one. It’s called JLINC, and it’s from JLINC Labs. It’s also open source. You’ll find it at Github, here. It’s still early, at v.0.3. So there’s lots of opportunity for developers and constructive hackers of all kinds to get involved.

Specifically, JLINC is a protocol for sharing data protected by the terms under which it is shared, such as those under development by Customer Commons and the Consent and Information Sharing Working Group (CISWG) at Kantara.

The sharing instance is permanently recorded in a distributed ledger (such as a blockchain) so that both sharer and recipient have a permanent record of what was agreed to. Additionally, both parties can build up an aggregated view of their information sharing over time, so they (or their systems) can learn from and optimize it.

The central concept in JLINC is an Information Sharing Agreement (ISA). This allows for—

  1. the schema related to the data being shared so that the data can be understood by the recipient without prior agreement
  2. the terms associated with the data being shared so that they can be understood by the recipient without prior negotiation
  3. the sharing instance, and any subsequent onward sharing under the same terms, to be permanently recorded on a distributed ledger of subsequent use (compliance and analytics)

To test and demonstrate how this works, JLINC built a demonstrator to bring these three scenarios to life. The first one tackled is Intentcasting , a long-awaited promise of VRM. With an Intencast, the customer advertises her intention to buy something, essentially becoming a qualified lead. (Here are all the ProjectVRM blog posts here with the Intentcasting tag.)

Obviously, the customer can’t blab her buying intention out to the whole world, or marketers would swarm her like flies, suck up her exposed data, spam her with offers, and sell or give away her data to countless other parties.

With JLINC, intention data is made available only when the customer’s terms are signed. Those terms specify permitted uses. Here is one such set (written for site visiting, rather than intentcasting):

UserSubmittedTerms2ndDraft

These say the person’s (first party’s) data is being shared exclusively with the second party (the site), for no limit in time, for the site’s use only, provided the site also obey the customer’s Do Not Track signal. I’m showing it because it lays out one way terms can work in a familiar setting

For JLINC’s intentcasting demonstration, terms were limited to second party use only, and a duration of thirty days. But here’s the important part: the intentcast spoke to a Salesforce CRM system, which was able to—

  1. accept or reject the terms, and
  2. respond to the intentcast with an offer,
  3. while the handshake between the two was recorded in a blockchain both parties could access

This means that JLINC is not only a working protocol, but that there are ways for VRM tools and systems to use JLINC to engage CRM systems. It also means there are countless new development opportunities on both sides, working together or separately.

Here’s another cool thing:  the two biggest CRM companies, Salesforce and Oracle, will hold their big annual gatherings in the next few weeks. This means JLINC and VRM+CRM can be the subjects of both conversation and hacking at either or both events. Specifically, here are the dates:

  1. Oracle’s OpenWorld 2016 will be September 18-22.
  2. Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2016  will be October 4-7.

Both will be at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Conveniently, the next VRM Day and IIW will both also happen, as usual, at the end of October:

  1. VRM Day will be October 24.
  2. Internet Identity Workshop (IIW’s XXIIIth) will be October 25-27.

Both will take place at the Computer History Museum, in downtown Silicon Valley. And JLINC, which was launched at the last VRM Day, is sure to be a main topic of discussion, starting at VRM Day and continuing through IIW, which I consider the most leveraged conference in the world, especially for the price.

If all goes well, we’ll have some examples of VRM+(Oracle and/or Salesforce) CRM to show off at Demo Day at IIW.

Love to see other CRM vendors show up too. You listening, SugarCRM? (I spoke about VRM+CRM at SugarCon in 2011. Here’s my deck from that talk. What we lacked then, and since, was a protocol for that “+”. Now we have it. )

Big HT to Iain Henderson of both JLINC Labs and Customer Commons, for guiding this post, as well as conducting the test that showed, hey, it can be done!

 

 

 

 

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Why Facebook buying WhatsApp is good for #VRM

February 20, 2014 / / 2 Comments

WhatsFace is a huge deal for VRM, but not just in the ways we’re hearing about so far.

For example, Henry Blodgett is right that Facebook paying $19 billion dollars in cash and stock for WhatsAppis a bargain. Hey, WhatsApp is a real business with a half-zillion customers, growing at a phenomenal rate, and a great platform for more revenue models. Sarah Lacy nails this point too, and adds wisdom about valuations.

And Xeni is right that “dominance in the developing world” is another big reason why it’s a smart move. Josh Constine and Kim-Mai Cutler at TechCrunch agree. (Great chart there, though SMS needs to be in it too, because it would still dwarf everything else.)

And lots of other folks are also right to say that WhatsFace will be a threat to Amazon, Apple, Google, mobile carriers and other big players.

But Zach Seward in Quartz scores a #VRM bulls-eye with WhatsApp’s anti-ad philosophy is really a broad new vision for mobile. He brings me in too, with a quoted blast from the distant past:

But there’s something else, more fundamental: a disquieting suspicion that, in the long run, advertising simply might not work for the mobile web.

“No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they’ll see tomorrow,” Koum wrote in 2012. It echoed a prophesy that writer Doc Searls made about the web all the way back in 1998: “There is no demand for messages.”

Of course, Searls wasn’t talking about the kind of person-to-person messages that WhatsApp specializes in. Rather, he was pushing the idea that the internet would lead to the erosion of mass media where messages—think corporate marketing or political messaging—could be imposed on people no matter what. That happened to an extent, but most of the web’s big businesses—Facebook chief among them—can fairly be described as mass media. At any rate, they have been successful selling ads.

What if things are different—and much closer to Searls’s vision—on the mobile internet? Koum certainly thinks so: ”Cellphones are so personal and private to you that putting an advertisement there is not a good experience,” he said last year. He has described mobile messaging as a utility akin to water or gas.

Or perhaps, well, a phone company. After all, WhatsApp transmits 18 billion messages a day, but doesn’t send any itself.

I wrote that line a year before Chris Locke, Rick Levine, David Weinberger and I put up The Cluetrain Manifesto. But, even though Cluetrain is best known for the line “markets are conversations,” its most radical and prophetic clue was actually this one, by Chris:

It was for lack of “dealing with it” — business welcoming free and independent customers — that I posted The Intention Economy in Linux Journal in March 2006. It’s also why I started ProjectVRM later that same year — and why I reported on VRM work in The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge (Harvard Business Review Press, 2012). There are now more than 100 listings on our VRM Development Work page. The creation of WhatsFace just made that work much more valuable. Here is why I think so.

It’s a worldwide millennial thing. As Xeni pointed out, many or most of Whatsapp’s half-billion customers are in geographics and demographics where Facebook is post-peak. These people communicate primarily by text and hate paying the extractive fees required by carriers for SMS.

WhatsApp has real customers. Not just consumers. The 99¢/year Whatsapp charges is 99¢ more than users are paying now for Facebook itself. This means Facebook has, for the first time, consumers who are also customers. Having a paid relationship with customers who are not mere consumers (or, in the lingo of the drug and computer industries, “users”) is a huge thing. It closes a split that not only troubles Facebook, but Google and every other business with an advertising-only model. And think about this possibility (or from where I sit, certainty): what made Whatsapp especially valuable and distinctive from the start was not having advertising. It says advertising on mobile has net-negative value — not for advertisers, who are out of the loop, but for human beings using mobile devices. Here in the VRM development world we’ve been been waiting for the advertising bubble to deflate, and now Facebook makes $19 billion bet on it. This should yank the veil off the eyes of everybody who still thinks advertising is going to “pay for the free Web” or whatever. It never really did, and it never will. Real business will happen here, in addition to the stuff that was free before advertising came along. Lots of it will happen directly, between anybody and everybody. And remember, Zuck never liked advertising. (Seen the movie? Zuck’s antipathy toward advertising drove a major sub-plot that still hasn’t played out.) Oh, and putting Jan Koum, WhatsApp’s CEO, on Facebook’s board gives Facebook a good heart to go along with its smart heads.

The holy grail of mobile payments is within reach. WhatsApp already integrates audio, video and photography. Next up: voice service to beat Skype’s and conference calling to beat Skype’s and everybody else’s. Why not? Skype has been idle since Microsoft bought it and the rest of them suck in their own ways. Payments will be harder, and there are political and regulatory hurdles (plus huge competitors, some of which might be potential partners). But soon the electric slab your pocket might finally integrate with your wallet.

Next up: intentcasting. How long before you point your phone at a pair of shoes, or a QR or barcode for any product, and either ask the seller (by text) if they have it in the size and color you want, or advertise your desire to the world, either socially (telling friends) or privately (telling nobody but potential sellers who agree to your terms)? Play a little API and programming jazz and you’re in business. (“You” being anybody, or, of course, Facebook.)

The tech matters. Whatsapp uses a customized version of XMPP (originally called Jabber), the open protocol created by Jeremie Miller and the team now working on Telehash. I bring this up not for WhatsFace, but for the rest of us. There are plenty of free and open building materials laying around. Go build something.

Here are some places to start, where #VRM has already blazed some paths to the frontier.

Truly personal clouds. I’m talking about your own secure and fully personal virtual spaces in the connected world, not just places to store stuff. These personal clouds will have their own open source operating systems (e.g. CloudOS), programming languages (e.g. KRL), privacy canon (e.g. the Respect Trust Framework) and protocols (e.g. XDI).

Integration with the Internet of Things. I wrote about this a year ago here. Phil Windley explains here how every thing (which he calls a pico, for persistent compute object) can have its own cloud. And how those clouds can live in your cloud. And how they can interact with other things, and service, and APIs, programatically.

Customer service run by customers. Right now CRM — customer relationship management — is broken in this one simple and single way: You can’t relate in one way to every company, but must go inside each one’s closed silo to do anything, in different ways in which the company calls all the shots and you call exactly none. Wouldn’t it be much cooler to be able to change your address or phone number one time for every company you deal with, and not separately? And wouldn’t it be much better if you and the companies you deal with had shared spaces where you both kept usage records, product updates, contact information and everything else? This is do-able. I wrote about it here in an HBR post.

Better economic signaling. Intentcasting is one example. Another is people running their own customer service platforms, for everything they care about, in their own clouds. (As in the last two items above.) In both cases customers will be able to signal intentions (about shopping, buying, requiring service, whatever) far more efficiently and consistently. And the failings of advertising, which Don Marti has done a great job unpacking.

Market based marketing. Once free customers prove more valuable than captive ones, marketing will find that actually talking to people will have a lot more leverage than trying to herd them like cattle, or force them to operate inside feudal empires.

The pendulum is swinging away from centralization, back toward the distributed nature of the Net as it was designed in the first place. Here is how Paul Baran described the Net’s future architecture in 1962:

Ever since the Net went viral in 1995, companies and governments have been trying to stuff the distributed genie back inside the centralized (or by compromise, decentralized) bottles. Now, in post-Snowden time, we’re learning the errors of those ways, and are  ready for truly distributed solutions. It should help that some of us around ProjectVRM are already downstream in that direction.

Personal = Sovereign

February 6, 2014 / / 1 Comment

We are all different.different

We look different, we sound different, we think and act different. Even soldiers marching lock-step in uniform are all different. Emperor Qui Shi Huang recognized this fact by having his sculptors put a different face on every soldier in the terracotta army.

Even identical twins are not identical.

Devon Loffreto has a useful word for this state. He calls it sovereign. Here are a few of his posts on the matter:

I wrote about it here:

For as long as we’ve had identifiers in computer and network system namespaces, we have been talking about administrative identities, not sovereign ones.

All administrative identities are silo’d: isolated inside systems and their namespaces. The Internet, which cyber-utopians (me included) cheer for its decentralized peer-to-peer and end-to-end architectural graces, has become a vast forest of centralized systems, each a silo. This Great Silo Forest is a hall of administrative mirrors. Your reflection in each is not you, but an administrative version of you.

Want a sense of how bad this is? Go into your browser prefs and hunt down the place where your logins and passwords are kept. Every one of those login/password combinations is for a different you, that each different system knows separately, owns separately and controls separately.

The concern in that post is identity. That’s personal, but so is much else: personal spaces, personal possessions, personal preferences, personal relationships and so on. What do we mean by personal in each of those cases?

In the physical world, the meaning is obvious, and the usage so common that we use the pronouns my and mine. But in the virtual world the boundaries are not so clear. Is the data a company collects about me really mine?

Yet we need to develop better  understandings, better definitions, better vocabularies — before the norms of the still-young virtual world catches up with the physical one, where civilization has been around for millennia.

I heard last night from a colleague that a word gaining currency with some young people is sovereign. In the past it was a word that applied mostly to countries and governments. Says the Free Dictionary,

adj.

1. Self-governing; independent: a sovereign state.
2. Having supreme rank or power: a sovereign prince.
3. Paramount; supreme: Her sovereign virtue is compassion.
4. a. Of superlative strength or efficacy: a sovereign remedy. b. Unmitigated: sovereign contempt.

Since so much of what we do as persons in the virtual world was once do-able only by large organizations (computing and networking, for example), this makes sense.

And, given our much our personal spaces and our agency have been compromised, sovereignty is a state devoutly to be wished for.

Here is how Chris Locke put it in The Cluetrain Manifesto, fifteen years ago:

we are not seats or eyeballs or end users or consumers. we are human beings and our reach exceeds your grasp. deal with it.

While privacy is a huge concern, and something about which VRM developers have much to offer, it tends also to be understood in defensive terms.  Sovereign is more positive, and has a great deal of dignity as well.

So I’m rooting for it.

Big Data, meet Big Privacy

December 6, 2013 / / 6 Comments

Look up “big data” (with the quotes) today on Google, and you’ll results that look like this:

Basically, a heap of hype. The only visible organic search results are a Wikipedia article and the a May 2011 report that McKinsey wrote for corporate customers. I am sure some of those same customers are among the advertisers hogging acreage in search results.

Whenever you see a money river that gets bigger and bigger while flowing in a circle, you’ve looking at a mania. That’s what we see here, and in Google Trends as well:

Big Data today is entirely an obsession of the B2B (Business to Business) world. It may fuel B2C (Business to Consumer); but the consumer does not participate except as a source of data and as a target for marketing messages guided by Big Data analytics. So, while we get to witness the Big Data mania as individuals, we don’t participate in it.

But we will.

Think about computing before it got personal around the turn of the ’80s. Before then, “personal computer” was an oxymoron. But eventually computers became something everybody had. Today our phones are computers. The same thing happened with networking. Before the Internet got huge in the mid-’90s, networking was something companies and governments did.  Today computing and networking are fully personal as well as fully corporate. And far more value is generated by people computing and networking than by companies doing it only with themselves and each other.

It’s a good bet that Big Data will follow the same path. Individuals will be able to do far more with data of all sizes than would ever be possible in the B2B world alone.

Meanwhile, the B2B appetite for “big data,” and eagerness to use it to market at us, has raised privacy as an issue. Back in the pre-Internet world, privacy wasn’t very controversial. We all knew what it was, and how to protect it most of the time. In the new digital world, we don’t, except through relatively primitive means, such as ad and tracking blocking. In The Rise of Ad Blocking, published in August 2013, PageFair found an average ad blocking rate of 22.7%. On some browsers it’s much higher:

This is the market speaking.

So is Big Privacy: Bridging Big Data and the Personal Data Ecosystem Through Privacy by Design, a paper published today by Ann Cavoukian, Ph.D. and Drummond Reed. Ann is the Information & Privacy Commissioner for Ontario, Canada, and Drummond is Co-Founder and CEO of Respect Network. Ann is also behind Privacy By Design, which “advances the view that the future of privacy cannot be assured solely by compliance with legislation and regulatory frameworks; rather, privacy assurance must become an organization’s default mode of operation.”

Both Ann and Drummond are coming from the customer side of the C2B relationship. In other words, they are coming from the need for VRM ways to solve market problems and open up new opportunities. It also goes straight after “big data”:

Recent technological and business developments have given rise to a new understanding of personal information. It is now being compared to currency and energy1—often being referred to as “the new oil.” It is an economic asset generated by the identities and behaviors of individuals and their technological surrogates. These metaphors, which express its increasing economic value to organizations, ring especially true in the case of Big Data. Indeed, Big Data derives economic value from its use of personal information to such an extent that if personal information is considered to be “the new oil,” then Big Data is the machinery that runs on it.

However, like our current dependence on fossil fuels, Big Data’s current use of personal information is unsustainable, increasingly resulting in “pollution” via privacy infringement. At the moment, individuals have little, if any, control over their information’s use and disclosure in Big Data analytics. In addition to a host of privacy concerns, this lack of informational self-determination gives rise to an uneven exchange of the economic value. While the owners of Big Data algorithms profit from their use and disclosure of personal information, the individuals the personal information relates to do not—at least not directly. If not properly addressed, the privacy and economic concerns raised by Big Data threaten to decrease individuals’ willingness to share their personal information—in effect, cutting off the flow of the “oil” on which the analytic “machinery” of Big Data runs.

The report describes the Personal Data Ecosystem (PDE) as “the emerging landscape of companies and organizations that believe individuals should be in control of their personal information and directly benefit from its use, making available a growing number of tools and technologies to enable such control,” adding (in boldface type), “So if privacy infringement is the negative externality that Big Data frequently ignores, the PDE is the emerging positive externality that can turn the combination into a positive-sum outcome where both data subjects and Big Data users benefit.”
The paper defines Big Privacy this way:

Big Privacy is Privacy by Design writ large, i.e., it is the application of the 7 principles of Privacy by Design, not only to individual organizations, applications, or contexts, but to entire networks, value chains, and ecosystems, especially those that produce and use Big Data. The goal of Big Privacy is the systemic protection of personal data and radical personal control over how it is collected and used. Radical control is an embodiment of “informational self- determination”—the right enshrined in the German Constitution relating to the individual’s ability to determine the fate of one’s information.12 This means that it must be possible to assure whole populations that their privacy is being respected because the network, value chain, and/or ecosystem producing and processing Big Data has implemented Privacy by Design at a system-wide level, enabling individuals who consent to the use of their personal information to reap a proportion of the benefits. 

The paper goes on to detail seven architectural elements of Big Privacy:

  1. Personal Clouds
  2. Semantic Data Interchange
  3. Trust Frameworks
  4. Identity and Data Portability
  5. Data-By-Reference (or Subscription)
  6. Accountable Pseudonyms
  7. Contractual Data Anonymization

These in turn leverage the  “Seven Foundational Principles of Privacy by Design”:

  1. Proactive not Reactive; Preventative not Remedial
  2. Privacy as the Default Setting
  3. Privacy Embedded into Design
  4. Full Functionality – Positive-Sum, not Zero-Sum
  5. End-to-End Security – Full Lifecycle Protection
  6. Visibility and Transparency – Keep it Open
  7. Respect for User Privacy – Keep it User-Centric

ProjectVRM gets a mention. I’d also like to add a pointer to the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, which has done pioneering work in the PDI, and whose work pulls toward the future alongside ours here.

The paper also does the best job I’ve seen yet of explaining the Respect Trust Framework and XDI, both of which normally require a lot of mental chewing to get down. They still do; just less this time.

I’ve always thought that XDI was a brilliant and elegant solution looking for a problem. I still do. The difference now is that it’s found the right one.

Come to VRM & Personal Cloud Day

October 20, 2013 / / 0 Comments

Tomorrow, Monday 21 October, is VRM and Personal Cloud Day at the Computer History Museum. Register at that link. It’s free. Or just show up. (Registering gives us a better idea of head count.)

It’s the time and place to brainstorm about both topics, plus what we’ll be discussing and moving forward the following three days at IIW, also at the CHM.

More details here.

It’s all about leverage on the future. So be there.

VRM happenings in France

November 15, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Before I spoke briefly to the Cap Digital innovation cluster in Paris a few weeks ago, I asked how many in the audience had heard of VRM. Every hand went up.

FING, the Foundation Internet Nouvelle Génération, has been hip to VRM for some time. So have many of its members, which overlap with Cap Digital and other tech/business circles.

Companies such as Privowny (founded a by Hervé Le Jouan and HQ’d in Palo Alto) and OneCub are addressing multiple VRM challenges.

The latest bit of encouragement comes in the form of a tweet from @DigiWorldIDATE, posted from the DigiWorld Summit, a three-day event that wrapped today in Montpelier, France. The tweet is in this haystack here. If anybody was there and wants to report on what got talked about, please share it. From what little I read, sounds like it was good.

Bonus link.

 

An olive branch to advertising

September 12, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Online advertising has a couple of big problems that could possibly be turned into opportunities. One is Do Not Track, or DNT. The other is blocking of ads and/or tracking.

In my last post I talked about how DNT might be turned into DNT-D, for Do Not Track – Dialog. Then I said a bit more about that in this post at Harvard Business Review. Note that DNT is one among many possible HTTP headers. If DNT bogs down in politics (which it already has to some degree), there is nothing to stop anybody from working on alternatives that create opportunities for agreement and productive hand shaking between users and sites.

On blocking of ads and tracking, I’ll start by leveraging this from my HBR post:

According to ClarityRay’s Adblock Report, issued in May of this year, the overall rate of ad-blocked impressions in the U.S. and Europe is 9.26%. Even if we discount the source (ClarityRay’s business deals with ad blocking), the rate of ad blocking is substantial. Mozilla shows 170.5 million downloads of Adblock Plus, with more than 3 million downloads in the last 30 days alone, and an average of 13.9 million daily users. That’s for just one add-on for one browser.

People are also taking action against unwanted tracking. All the major browsers support some form of Do Not Track (DNT) signaling by browser users to websites, and Microsoft is committed to turning it on by default with the next version of Internet Explorer.

But to engage, VRM can’t just draw lines in the sand. It will also provide ways to cross those lines, offer a handshake, and back that handshake by demonstrating new and better ways of doing business.

Next, here’s a list of ad blocking tracking monitoring and blocking services, listed in the ProjectVRM wiki:

Abine DNT+, deleteme, PrivacyWatch: privacy-protecting browser extentions

Collusion Firefox add-on for viewing third parties tracking your movements

Disconnect.me  browser extentions to stop unwanted tracking, control data sharing

Ghostery  browser extension for tracking the trackers

PrivacyScore  browser extensions and services to users and site builders for keeping track of trackers

And I’m sure that leaves out a few more.

This is all a natural reaction simple bad manners on the part of sites and some of their advertisers and third party partners. Civilization runs on manners. The whole Net runs on the form of manners we call protocols. These are simply agreements about how things get along. They take the form of working together. In most cases no agreements are signed.

This is very much the way things work in the open marketplaces of the physical world. When we go in to a store, we behave as civilized human beings, and the stores are discreet about following us. (Which they do in many cases, and we know, either tacitly or explicitly.)

When you walk out of a department store on Main Street or a mall, nobody follows you with their hand in your pocket, saying “I’m just following you around so we can give you a better experience.” Yet this is nearly pro forma on the commercial Web today, and why we have the growing list of work-arounds above.

Yet few of us want no advertising at all, anywhere. Most of us appreciate what advertising can do, and certainly what it pays for, which is many of the graces that constitute the Web we know, starting with search.

The advertising business does have a conscience. The IAB, for example, has a Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising. Leaders in that industry, such as John Battelle and Randall Rothenberg, have done much to address the industry’s problems with overreach.

But they can’t do it alone. We can help from our end. One way is by making DNT-D happen, or by coming up with something better that respects what only advertising can do (as well as what we’d rather not have it do). Another is by bringing industry reps and tech developers into dialog with some of the development work we’re doing.

A good place to do both, and to just get dialog going, is at IIW, the Internet Identity Workshop, an inexpensive unconference we hold twice per year at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. The next one will be on 23-25 October. Hope to see you there.

Bonus links from Zemanta (which I’m using experimentally here):

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