Vint Cerf: Introducing the People-Centered Internet Newsletter
peoplecentered.net
peoplecentered.net
Desirable properties of the People-centered Internet:
1. Complete universal Internet coverage that enables functionality that is otherwise unreachable or ineffective
2. The Internet is affordable, open, available and accessible to all
3. Fosters digital literacy, local content in local language to achieve widespread usage and increased value to people, families, communities and countries
4. The system achieves a level of trust that meets the users’ expectations of affordability, privacy, safety
5. The quantity and quality of educational and information services is increasingly available to families and communities
6. Anyone can contribute to improvement of the utility of the global Internet.
7. Personal information in the digital environment is protected by law and controlled by the individual
This may not have been explicitly listed, but a user-centric communication medium does not perpetrate psychological warfare against its users and reward distracting them, stalking and profiling them, or exploiting their naïvete. It empowers them by giving them access to information on their terms. This is definitional.
I agree with his characterization of advertising, and that to be "people centric", there would be no ads by definition.
And I only say that because I believe freedom of expression - and that includes commercial expression - is sacrosanct. In my opinion, a truly "people centric" platform allows my right to serve whatever I want (within the bounds of the law) to supercede anyone else's personal ethics.
The same principle applies to "people centric".
I think you keep inserting "ban" into what you're responding to when no one is saying that. Try rereading the article and the parent comments without that bias.
If advertising were to reach the quality and targettedness that they were telling you about things you genuinely wanted, it would be a useful service. Kind of like advertising as a recommendation engine. That would be quite people centric.
I don't think we will get there though.
from the very first sentence... "to vector Internet evolution" urgh!
It's written in a very heavy "government corporate" language. To be honest, who is the audience that this letter is supposed to reach?
People that can't read "government corporate" language are not going to even attempt to read it. It's a shame really because the message is a good one, but they need to change how they write if they don't want their message lost.
This is Google. I assume they anticipate low expectations.
People tend to expect that businesses run to the lowest common denominator: if it is profitable, then they will do it. This is demonstrably false, though. Most companies avoid the most egregious crimes in our society, and others actually take moral stands on various issues (Lush comes to mind [2]). But of course, no matter what, it's always going to be a nuanced issue (see the comments in the second link to see some people's negative reactions).
Somewhat like Lush, Google has potential to improve the situation and position itself as "the least bad" option. The reality of the situation is that while privacy is very important, almost nobody wants to be completely private. They want to advertise things about themselves -- even to the whole world (see Facebook). Possibly they even want to lie about themselves, but this is still compatible with selling them things to help them sustain their fantasy.
From the perspective of targeting ads, it seems to me to be much more effective to target the "public persona" that people wish others to see rather than the true private person. Building better tools that allow someone to say, "This is how I wish the world to see me" is much, much better than trolling through their personal information and patching up a profile that nobody wishes to expose. And for the few people who wish to be an informational black hole? You weren't going to sell them anything anyway.
P.S. I understand that Google and others have a very long way to go to make this kind of thing a reality. It's just that I don't see it as being antithetical to their business goals.
[1] - https://github.com/google/end-to-end [2] - https://uk.lush.com/article/lush-ethical-company
There used to be "bulletin board systems" (BBS) software that was point-to-point, ran on local systems, and was fully distributed. Anyone could customize their own BBS. Lists of available BBS were circulated. It was the ultimate people-centered architecture.