The firm behind the digital revival of Vice is aiming to close this month on the insolvent adtech company.

It’s interesting that #mainstreaming tech makes it easy to use you, while alternative tech makes it hard to use freedom. One is built for control – and works very well at it. The other is built for freedom – but often works badly at delivering it. That’s the real #techshit problem we face, we need to make freedom easier to use than control. The latest #fashionista panic about AI scraping is exposing a real problem with how we understand and defend the #openweb. Faced with aggressive commercial data extraction by the #dotcons and #AI industry, the response from parts of the traditional media establishment and mainstreaming policymakers is to restrict automated access, demand identification and introduce new controls over who can collect #4opens available information. This is the wrong direction. We have a genuine problem of #dotcons extracting open flows, enormous amounts of public information, imposing costs on the people who create, host and maintain it. They take the value generated by the #openweb, feed it into proprietary systems and then build closed commercial products that bypass the original sources. This is another round of enclosure. But shutting down the tools that make the #openweb work is not a solution, it leads to destroying the infrastructure we need to challenge this enclosure. The native #openweb depends on open flows, automated crawling, scraping, indexing, archiving and redistribution are not some new abuse of the internet. They are fundamental parts of how the native #openweb develops. Search engines, independent journalism, public-interest research, accessibility projects, security monitoring and archives all depend on the ability to collect and process publicly available information. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has preserved more than a trillion web pages. Investigative journalists have used automated collection to expose conflicts of interest in government. Researchers use it to examine discrimination, misinformation and corporate behaviour. These activities need the #KISS ability to follow information across the web without asking permission from every website owner. Sometimes anonymity is needed, if a journalist, researcher or activist investigating powerful interests has to identify themselves and explain what they are looking for, the investigation itself is compromised. An #openweb cannot depend on asking permission from every gatekeeper before we see, collect, preserve and share public information. The problem is extraction, not openness – we need to distinguish between two very different things. There is grassroots, public-interest use of automated tools to make information accessible, preserve knowledge and connect communities. Then there is the #dotcons industrial-scale commercial extraction, the gray area were they take the collective output of the openweb, concentrate it into private databases and use it to build proprietary #closedweb services. These are not the same activity. The problem is not that information flows freely, it is that the value created by those flows is being enclosed and privately captured. Making every crawler identify itself doesn’t solve this. A commercial scraper can identify itself and still overwhelm a server with requests. Meanwhile, an independent archivist or journalist could be deterred from doing legitimate work simply because they cannot safely disclose their identity. We need to regulate harmful behaviour, not criminalize the basic mechanisms of openness. The #geekproblem is about trying to control the mess instead of fixing it. When faced with complex social and technical problem, the instinct is to introduce another layer of technical control, identification and permission. But the native #openweb was built on a different understanding: distributed participation, open protocols, independent servers and the ability to connect information across organizational boundaries. We should be strengthening the infrastructure that allows independent websites, archives and communities to survive. What the #OMN adds is rebuilding the commons. The answer is not to retreat into closed platforms, private APIs, permission-based networks or another generation of corporate-controlled infrastructure. We need to rebuild the shared flows, it is not about pretending that every use of public information is harmless. It is about building the social and technical capacity to distinguish useful participation from destructive extraction. Don’t repeat the mistake – for too long, we have allowed the #dotcons to take the value of the native #openweb while selling us increasingly closed replacements. Now, faced with the consequences, some people want to restrict the openness that made the internet useful in the first place. We cannot allow the response to commercial enclosure to become another round of enclosure. The native #openweb was never perfect, it has technical debt, weak governance, funding problems and social conflicts. But it gave us something we have largely lost, the possibility of building collective power through open information flows. We need to recover that. The answer to bad bots is not to break the web, the answer to commercial extraction is not to close public information, the answer to platform power is not another platform with more controls. The path is simple, we need to reboot the #openweb, not shut it down. That means rebuilding the grassroots communities, shared infrastructure and collective governance that allow openness to grow real social value. https://www.techpolicy.press/breaking-the-open-web-wont-stop-the-bad-bots * * * ### Discover more from #OMN (Open Media Network) Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

From hospitality exchange to venture capital, from grassroots community to corporate platform. The story of #Couchsurfing is a warning about what happens when we confuse building a network with building a community. The story of Couchsurfing is more interesting than a failed social network, it is a history of what happened to native #openweb paths when grassroots roots are overtaken by #NGO turns, startup culture and eventually the fantasies of the #dotcons. There are lessons here for anyone trying to rebuild an open, grassroots internet today.. The roots were always social, not technological. Hospitality exchange didn’t begin with the internet, networks like Servas, founded in 1949, built on a simple human idea: people open their homes, share resources and create relationships across cultural and national boundaries. Later came Esperanto networks, Hospitality Club, Couchsurfing and more. The internet didn’t invent this, but it gave an existing movement new tools to organize, communicate and grow. This is a native lesson, the technology grows from existing human relationships and grassroots practice, not pretending we create community from nothing. Hospitality Club, founded in 2000, was built through voluntary programming, translation, moderation, member support and organizing. Couchsurfing (#CS) grew from volunteers organizing local groups, hosting travellers, running potlucks, to built relationships and created a culture that no software company could have manufacture. The website was a small part of the infrastructure, the network was people. The first failure on this path, was confusing community goodwill with ownership. Couchsurfing’s 2006 database crisis showed the strength of original model. Volunteers helped raise money and rebuilt the platform in ten days, think about that. A community mobilize people, money and technical skills to rescue shared infrastructure because people believed in what they were building. But this created a fundamental question that the native #openweb has repeatedly failed to answer, who owns the value created by community? The volunteers had supplied labour, expertise, relationships and trust, yet they had no reliable guarantee that the resulting infrastructure would remain under community control. Disputes over volunteer code, NDAs and management transparency exposed this. BeVolunteer and BeWelcome emerged from this wider conflict, attempting to build the same community based on more formal nonprofit organization and participation. This was an #NGO fork in the road, one path treated community participation as the foundation of a shared resource, the other treated it as an asset that could be managed, controlled and eventually sold. The #CS NGO turn was replacing grassroots power with professional management, this is where the story connects to the wider #openweb, as grassroots networks grew, they increasingly encounter the world of professional nonprofits, foundations, institutional funding and eventually venture capital. The promise was sustainability, reality was a transfer of power. Instead of building stronger grassroots governance, projects began importing management structures from the institutions they were supposed to offer alternatives to. Consultants, boards, executives, funding applications, professional communications and organizational hierarchies. The people who actually made the networks were pushed towards the edges. #CS move towards private commercial ownership in 2011 was a example of this mess. A reported $7.6 million investment round, followed by further venture funding, transformed a community-oriented network into a privately controlled company. Members were not meaningfully consulted about the transfer, the wiki disappeared, community information became private, volunteer structures changed and growth became a corporate priority. The language of community remained, the community’s power did not. This is the #NGO problem, hollowing out grassroots relationships that brings the value. Not every nonprofit follows this path, #BeWelcome and other alternatives demonstrate that different organizational choices are possible. The problem is not paying people or raising money, the problem is allowing the funding structure to displace the community’s purpose and control. Couchsurfing eventually became a example of the #dotcons business fantasy of growth, not community. The assumption was that the vertical scaling of more members, more investment, more marketing and more professional management would produce a stronger network. And yes for a time, the network might grow while its social purpose disappeared. This is the contradiction of the #dotcons, they measure growth in accounts, engagement, traffic and financial value, while the thing that has value, the human network comes from trust, participation, reciprocity and relationships. You can buy growth, you cannot buy the social fabric that makes a network work in meaningfully ways. In 2020, Couchsurfing introduced mandatory contributions in many countries, making access conditional on payment. People who had spent years building the network were now being forced to pay to access the relationships and infrastructure they had create. The problem behind this was a normal mainstreaming one, it wasn’t only that the network needed money, the problem was who controlled it, who decided how it was funded and who benefited from the value it generated. This fall is when the community starts to leave, the platform is already dead, the failure of Couchsurfing wasn’t a particular CEO, funding round or paywall, it was the gradual destruction of the reciprocal relationship between the platform and its community. This is an important distinction for the #openweb, a network can remain technically online long after its community has disappeared. A project can have excellent open-source software while having no meaningful grassroots movement around it. The native #openweb was never just about publishing code, it was about building shared infrastructure through shared practice. When you remove that practice, you are left with an increasingly hollow technical shell. What we can learn from this dead native #openweb project? This might be useful for current projects like the #fedivers, there are some of the lessons: 1. Build the community before scaling the technology. Start with existing relationships, local groups, shared practices and real needs. Software should strengthen these relationships, not replace them. 2. Make governance part of the infrastructure. Don’t leave governance until after the software is built. Open code without open processes still produce closed power structures. Participation, transparency, accountability and the ability to challenge decisions need to be designed into the project from the beginning. 3. Don’t confuse funding with sustainability. Money is necessary for developers, hosting, administration and maintenance. But funding should support the community rather than turn the community into a resource for funders. 4. Build networks, not platforms. A platform concentrates control, a network of interoperable, independently maintained communities distributes it. Shared data, open standards, portable identities and federated infrastructure make it harder for one organization to capture the network. 5. Value participation, not just numbers. A few hundred active people who trust each other, maintain the infrastructure and take collective responsibility can be worth more than millions of inactive accounts. This is why we need the #OMN, history is relevant to what we are trying to build, the #OMN, #OGB and #indymediaback. The native #openweb had the right instincts: open standards, voluntary participation, shared resources, grassroots organization and trust between people. But it repeatedly failed to build durable structures to protect those values when projects grew, funding arrived and professional management took over. We need to learn from that history rather than keep repeating it. The #OMN starts from a different place, not another social media platform competing for accounts and attention, it is a path to grow a shared network of media flows, where communities can publish, subscribe, moderate, curate and maintain their own connections to information. The technical foundation is important, but it is only one part of the work. * #4opens: Open data, open source, open standards and open process. * #OGB: Grassroots governance that makes collective ownership and accountability practical. * #indymediaback: Rebuilding community-based publishing and local media. * #MakingHistory: Building shared, federated archives where communities participate in preserving and interpreting their histories. The working path is to make the social relationships, data and infrastructure reinforce each other rather than allowing one organization to capture the value of the whole network. This is also why we need to resist the #NGO turn and the #dotcons fantasy. Both encourage us to hand over grassroots power in exchange for promises of professional delivery, scale and sustainability. #Couchsurfing shows where that road can lead, we shouldn’t build big networks, rather we need to build the grassroots foundations that allow networks to grow without losing their purpose. And that’s what we mean by the #OMN. * * * ### Discover more from #OMN (Open Media Network) Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

Gallica, la bibliothèque numérique de la BnF, fait face depuis quelque temps à de nombreux soucis techniques. D'après la Bibliothèque nationale de France, cela est dû aux robots IA qui moissonnent son...