One Bite at a Time

Cory Doctorow's column for the March 2023 issue of LOCUS, for once, asserts a position I can support without reservation:

End-to-End

Concerning the many problems involved in making the internet user-friendly, a quest for perfection may result in no improvement at all. As Doctorow summarizes the situation, "The internet succeeded where other networks failed" because it didn't try to implement a "seemingly monolithic technological project" that would require all parties to agree on an ultimate solution that would deal with all difficulties once and for all. Instead, find one small element that everyone can accept. "Build that, then do it again, finding another step that everyone can get behind." In other words, figuratively speaking, eat the elephant one bite (or byte?) at a time. To quote Doctorow again, "I want a better internet now, not years down the road. I’ll happily take a smaller bite."

The main issue to which his current column applies this approach is the end-to-end principle, an older name for what's now usually called net neutrality. In brief, "when a willing speaker wants to say something to a willing listener, our technology should be designed to make a best effort to deliver the speaker’s message to the person who asked to get it." After decades of development of the internet, why don't we have this transparently obvious, user-friendly system?

When we ask a question with Google, why does it prioritize its own search engine's results over those of others that might be more relevant to the questioner's needs? When we search for a specific book or other product on Amazon, why do several other products pop up at the top of the page ahead of the one we typed in the search box? Why do Facebook posts from people and organizations we actually want to hear from get drowned in a sea of sponsored posts? Well, yeah, money and profit (duh). But why are such practices legally permitted? Why is Facebook allowed to restrict our access to posts from users we've liked or followed by blackmailing them into "boosting" their posts—paying to have their material seen by people who've expressed a wish to see it? Suppose when we tried to telephone a local business, the phone company routed the call to a rival business that had paid for the privilege? Nobody would stand for that, yet the equivalent happens online all the time.

Doctorow suggests examples of a few modest rules that internet companies should be required to follow: E.g. “The first result for a search should be the product that most closely matches the thing I searched for” and “If I subscribe to your feed, then when you publish something, it should show up in my feed.”

For a long time I was puzzled that my posts on my Facebook author page showed such low numbers of "Reach." The page doesn't have a huge throng of followers, but it certainly has a lot more than those being "reached." It was a shock to learn that in order to be read by more than a handful of followers, those posts needed to be boosted. In other words, I would have to bribe Facebook to carry out the function it purports to perform, connecting senders with willing receivers. Likewise, it's a constant, though minor irritant that searching for a book on Amazon often connects to a page where I have to scroll halfway down to find the desired item. According to Doctorow, the volume of ads and sponsored posts is delicately designed to stay "just below the threshold where the service becomes useless to you." I fear he may be right.

Will the limited ideal of his online utopia ever become a reality? Maybe not, but it's worth discussing.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt