Now, I first acknowledge three mutually exclusive schools of thought:
- Regulators do not understand technology, and therefore they should leave innovation and industrial development to those who do, namely the technologists themselves.
- Regulators understand technology sufficiently, and are able to enact meaningful legislation to advance society.
- Regulators do not understand technology, and we have to fix it!
I understand that it is hard to sell to politicians that point 2 is not the case, but bear with me, I believe that we have much more in common than what separates us, namely, the end goal of democratic control of the progress of technology. Those who argue point 1 have very little to show for, as argued in the first paragraph.
I believe we are in the situation of point 3, and that it is not difficult to understand why we ended there. Even many who haven’t been to business school (like myself) are aware of the fundamentals of a business strategy framework known as VRIN/O. In this framework, you should understand what value you provide to customers, if it is rare enough for you to be a chosen provider, if someone else can easily imitate you and take your business, if it can be substituted with something else, and if you have the organization to pull it off.
Several of these rely on a certain exclusivity, that’s one of your key competitive advantages. Technology companies, especially software companies, is in the knowledge industry. The software itself is in my experience pretty easy to imitate if ideas and understanding is sufficiently clear. Thus, these companies are obviously very strategic about what knowledge they keep in house, and what they share, and also careful about building internal knowledge bases. Understandably, right? That’s really their business.
Often, this is not a problem. Often, it drives competition. If you have a system that you’ve been making 10% faster than a competitors system based on the knowledge you have, then you are likely to win in the marketplace, and your competitor has to do their research to keep up, or find some other value proposition to compete. This provides better value for customers, so everybody wins!
So, this is not in a general problem, but it is a disaster for society when the technology has normative effects. When that happens, then society ends up without the ability to influence the direction society is taking because it lacks the knowledge to understand what has happened. We end up with privatized governance. We end up living in a company town, without ever having opted into doing so.
And that’s where we’re living right now. It has to end. This is our town, not theirs.
We know what the alternative looks like, in fact, we have it all around us. Even big, closed systems consists mostly of Open Source Software. Open Source Software establishes non-exclusivity and non-subtractability. That is, anyone can use it, study it, make modifications and distribute it. Large businesses build Open Source sometimes because it is of no strategic value to control the knowledge behind it, or because it confers other strategic advantages, like attracting developers to their products. Usually, you see a little software on top of this systems that are closed, as I said, they are very strategic about it. This could happen for reasons of healthy competition, but often it is a ruse. Buyer beware!
This is where democracies need to get in, these strategic decisions must not be left to the companies alone. We must protect people from entering the ruse, and even more importantly, we must not allow exclusive knowledge for normative technology. Since we already know how to develop software that doesn’t have exclusivity, we should do that.
However, even though governance has always been a part of Open Source projects, it is not defined as part of it. Moreover, we haven’t been terribly good at it beyond meritocracies that produce excellent products. There’s a big jump from a meritocracy to a governance model that is part of democratic infrastructure, and this is the jump we have to make now. This is a conversation that happens within what is now called Digital Commons, as governance has for thousands of years been part of Commons, and humanity has been pretty good at it.
So, that’s how we ended up in this sorry situation: Common business strategy that went unchecked, and where the means to keep it in balance went under the radar. This can be fixed with normative technology.