The internet doesn’t need new rules. It just needs a new technology. Blockchain.

(But it’s not for the reasons you are thinking!)

This is an open contribution to challenge Mark Zuckerberg’s latest call to governments and regulators to sit around Facebook’s table to decide the future rules of the internet. In this paper we want to stimulate a debate into society about future technological scenarios and their influence on our everyday life. We will compare and challenge Facebook CEO’s suggestions about the future internet governance of content and information with the opportunities offered by Blockchain Technology.

By Donato Russo.

April 1st, 2019

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Sir,

I’ve spent most of the past two years focusing on Blockchain Technology and, among the others, issues like harmful content, elections integrity and privacy. I think it’s important to define what roles we want People and Governments to play in taking on these challenges. This is an open contribution to your ideas to stimulate a debate into society about future technological scenarios and their influence on our everyday life.

A technological shift

Technology is a major part of our lives, and companies such as Facebook have immense responsibilities. Every day Facebook makes decisions for us about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising, how to prevent sophisticated cyberattacks and much more.These decisions are important for keeping our community safe.

But if we were starting Facebook from scratch, on the Blockchain, we would ask People to make these judgments together, instead.

A more active role for People, Governments & Regulators

I believe in making such decisions we need a more active role for People, Governments and Regulators and a less active role for intermediaries. By updating the rules for the Internet and defining the new ones for the Blockchain, we can preserve what’s best about the web — the freedom for People to express themselves and to build new activities — while also protecting society from broader harms and making it more transparent.

From what I’ve learned (source: World Economic Forum), I believe we need a new technology able to shift the actual technological paradigm and bring it to the next level in six main areas: Identity and Persona Management, Governance and Law, Decentralized Asset Management, Environmental Sustainability, Economic and Social Structure, Financial Products and Services — including, of course, harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.

That technology is Blockchain.

Without analizing the broader spectra of the above mentioned areas, let’s focus on what Blockchain could bring to smaller and less regulated areas like the ones mentioned in your post.

Harmful content

First, harmful content. Facebook gives everyone a way to use their voice, and that creates real benefits from sharing experiences to growing movements. As part of this, it has a responsibility to keep people safe on its services. For Facebook that means “deciding what counts as terrorist propaganda, hate speech and more.” For the Blockchain instead, it means to collectively validate a transaction simply by using the technology.

Facebook by continually reviewing its “policies with experts”, is obviously admitting that at their scale they will “always make mistakes and decisions that people disagree with.” Unlike Facebook, on the Blockchain that wouldn’t simply happen because, among other reasons, the rules are shared, transparent, accessible to anyone on the ledger and, moreover, consensus-based.

A Facebook Tribunal?

Lawmakers, States and Authorities should speak with the quality and transparency of their laws and regulations by publishing them on public distributed ledgers. If they did, by default there wouldn’t be any need, neither for Facebook nor for anybody else, to “make so many important decisions about speech”. State Authorities or Regulatory Bodies’ public blockchains will do that and automatically connect and interface with private blockchains, as needed or required. At the same time, Facebook won’t need to create “an independent body so people can appeal” its decisions.

Needless to say that Facebook won’t need to work “with governments, including French officials, on ensuring the effectiveness of content review systems”: the Blockchain would validate (or not) the content, assign to it eventual degrees of automation — via a smart contract — and confer it immediate legal value by publishing it.

One simple gesture, the publication of the content on the Blockchain, will bear along level of securities, certification and automation higher than any actual existing procedure.

Blockchain enforces actual internet liabilities

If companies like Facebook already were on the Blockchain then they wouldn’t be accountable neither for enforcing standards on harmful content, because of the underlying technology, nor for removing it. The same would apply to any sharing service or user thus creating a great standardized approach!

With Blockchain, no third-party body would need to set standards governing the distribution of harmful content and measure activity against those standards. Regulatory bodies will set baselines for what is allowed or not and require Blockchain operators to build systems for keeping harmful content to a bare minimum.

I am pleased to hear, “Facebook already publishes transparency reports on how effectively” it is “removing harmful content”. All this effort wouldn’t be needed on the Blockchain since transparency it’s one of its crucial and “built-in” appreciated characteristics of the technology together with immutability and automation.

I believe every company should implement Blockchain’s higher standard of Trustful Information and Automation, because transparency it’s very important and leads to financial sustainability. Once we understand the absence of harmful content, we have no doubt that Blockchain is the solution where the baseline is set and shared.

Political campaigns and fact checking

Second, legislation is important for protecting elections and electors. Although Facebook “has already made significant changes around political ads”, on the Blockchain, electors will be able to have rapid access to both validated and unvalidated content thus being able to discern, in a trustful and certificated way, what is true from what is not. More than verifying political actors the technology will allow them to implement and validate their policies as they unfold (or not).

Online political promotion on the Blockchain will primarily focus on candidates’ personal validation scores and policy implementation rates, rather than divisive political issues which, in the end, would always be subject to the validation of the chain.

By adopting Blochchain, there will be no questions about how political promotion campaigns use data and targeting because everything happening on the distributed ledger would be immutably recorded and made both transparent and accessible to all.

We believe legislation should be published, kept and automaticallyt updated on the Blockchain to reflect the reality of the laws governing the whole community.

A stable framework for Data Protection

Third, effective privacy and data protection needs a globally harmonized framework. People around the world have called for comprehensive privacy regulation in line with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, and I concur with you: Blockchain provides exactly that needed common framework even at higher levels and standards than GDPR one of data protection.

Also Distributed Ledger Technology requires legislation and regulation. States around the World, on their own, are filling that gap. I would rather engage States in regulating Blockchain that in setting new rules for the internet.

Blockchain protects also your right to be rewarded for your actions, in a completely transparent and trustful way, and automatically decide if , how, where and how much your information, your data, is used — while enabling yourself to use information for safety purposes - also, potentially, providing services (in this case, your and Facebook’s case: content) for which one could be automatically paid upon Blockchain’s transaction verification and authentication.

This process requires data to be shared, in absolute transparency and in an immutable way, on a locally distributed ledger, which would make the system invulnerable to unwarranted access by default. And, by the way, it shouldn’t establish a way to hold companies such as Facebook accountable by imposing sanctions when we make mistakes because litigation is zeroed in Blockchain: think what a change for Facebook’s legal expenses budget!

I also believe Blockchain will create a common global framework — applying regulation that varies significantly by country and state — ensuring its raise and connecting nodes, people and things — allowing anyone to build products or create services that serve everyone, and everyone gets the same protections. In a peer-to-peer mode and including a decentralized payment system.

As lawmakers adopt new privacy regulations, Blockchain will instantly and automatically update and authenticate them, thus answering all the questions GDPR leaves nowadays open. In Blockchain, clear rules on when information is used to serve the public interest will be stated by the definition of a smart contract between the authority and the users/nodes also specifying how it should apply to new technologies such as artificial intelligence.

Consensus-based data portability

Finally, regulation should guarantee the principle of data portability. If you share data with another user/node, you shouldn’t be able to move it to another, prior consensus. This gives people choice and enables people to innovate and compete.

This is important for the World — and for creating services people ask for. It’s why we are building the Blockchain. True data portability should look more like the way people want than the existing ways you can download an archive of your information. The collective nodes on the distributed ledger will protect and validate information when it moves between services.

This also needs common standards: Blockchain ones.

Corporations and Blockchain adoption

I believe Facebook and alikes have no responsibility at all to help address these issues. Some companies have already built or are building Blockchain advanced systems for finding harmful content, stopping election interference and making ads more transparent either on public or private or “hybrid” blockchains. And people shouldn’t have to rely on individual companies addressing these issues by themselves because they will do it together, collectively. We should have a broader debate about what we want as a society and how blockchain can help. The four areas indicated you point at are important, but, of course, there’s more and at a much higher level to discuss before.

Should regulatory bodies allow Corporations to define internet new rules with them?

I think Corporations like the first-mover Facebook, have already or will soon start building their own private permissioned blockchains where to run intermediary business-as-usual. They, most probably, will build ad-hoc artificial intelligence based on their huge data-base. On the blockchain.

Data portability is therefore of high interest for you (and your company): drawing the rules about it together with States and Regulatory Bodies, will provide Facebook an open and monitoring eye over its business existence and potential future profits.

The way ahead

As a second step, I think Facebook will provide a payment system via a community tailored coin. It will be for Facebook a new revenue source on which to build financial services to offer within the private permissioned blockchain network created. This will probably happen after a massive sistems’ integration and the birth of a brand new social platform followed by a consequent mass-migration of users, on a new-centralized-all-in-one-platform. Paid services on Blockchain will follow.

On the other side, the rules governing the blockchain can and will allow a generation of entrepreneurs, anyone, to build products and/or services redefining processes and optimizing them in a transparent, immutable and automatable way. This fact will change the World, making it more of Trustful and full of new Opportunities creating a lot of value in people’s lives through decentralization and disintermediation.

The time to update these rules to define clear responsibilities for People, Companies and Governments going forward has arrived.

It’s called, Blockchain.

Donato Russo

Chainplug Founder & CEO

donato@chainplug.io