Wednesday, March 14, 2012

[oymuijwf] Lock-in vs Freedom

Sites like Twitter (and many others) seek to lock in their users in hopes of monopolistically extracting revenue (someday, somehow).  Unfortunately, this creates a single point of failure for freedom of speech, an attractive point of attack for censors.

A different architecture for Twitter could involve a user establishing a public key, then Twitter provides a forum for posting signed messages.  In the event of censorship, the user can easily migrate to a different service with the same public key, thereby maintaining identity and continuity.  We need a means to search for messages signed by a given public key.

We would also like a broad change in philosophy so businesses avoid the strategy of trying to lock in users.  It is bad for society, probably via externalities.  Regulation?

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