If You Build a Better Internet, Will They Come?

 

It's been quite a while since most thinking people agreed that there is something wrong with the way the Internet affects public and private life.  In the April issue of National Review, policy analyst Luke Hogg takes a hard look at one reason for these problems:  the effects of centralization.

 

He begins by harking back to the early hobbyist-style years of the Internet in the 1990s.  It was a time of relative freedom in the sense that users could control who they associated with and how much and what kind of information they shared.  Many online users were seeking the ideal proclaimed by an early statement of that era which Hogg quotes from the operators of YouTube:  "anyone with a video camera, a computer, and an internet connection could share their life, art, and voice with the world."

 

A lot of bits have passed through the Internet since then, and users' current trust in social media isn't much greater than their trust in legacy media:  less than one out of five people recently polled say they trust social media to provide accurate information.  One big perceived problem is censorship, and while many states have passed laws prohibiting social-media platforms from viewpoint censoring, the U. S. Supreme Court has ruled that such laws are likely to be unconstitutional, as they restrict a private entity's freedom of speech, or freedom to refrain from speech. 

 

And this is not just a U. S. problem.  Hogg cites the case of how Facebook inadvertently helped the military in Myanmar to incite violence against that country's Rohinga minority group.  It turned out that the Facebook monitors simply couldn't understand what was going on among the specific cultural groups involved.

 

Hogg sees these and other problems rooted in one factor:  centralization.  And he sees two solutions, both technological:  to give users greater control over their experiences on a given platform, and also to enable them to communicate as they wish across multiple platforms.

 

Right now, such customization is nearly impossible.  If you get tired of what's going on in your Facebook feed, you can up and quit, as millions of people have done from time to time.  But just quitting a platform deprives you of all the good your social network might have been doing, as well as allowing you to avoid the idiots who made you want to quit in the first place.

 

Hogg talks about "middleware," which is a name for software that works as a kind of concierge or secretary between the centralized mega-platforms such as Facebook and YouTube, and the individual user.  With the proper protocols in place, such middleware could defend children against pornography and stalking no matter which platform it came from, for instance. 

 

There have been experiments in this direction, but they have either been new built-from-the-ground-up platforms, or specialized software that interfaces between the user and existing platforms.  So far, they haven't made much of a dent in the problem, but they show that the technology is out there, waiting to be used.

 

Hogg says that some existing regulations would have to be changed in order for decentralization to progress meaningfully.  In particular, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act have had unexpected side effects that allow current platforms to suppress both competing content they don't like, and also stifle the kind of middleware that would allow decentralization.  These laws could be amended to fix these problems.  And Hogg also calls on the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission to encourage decentralization with a stick as well as a carrot.  Obviously, if things are going to change in a big way, the regulatory environment will have to change too.

 

My heart is with Hogg's ideas, but my head and my wallet see a big problem that Hogg seems to avoid:  how platforms will make money from a decentralized Internet. 

 

Allow me to be nerdy for a moment by quoting something called Metcalfe's Law, which, according to Wikipedia, "states that the financial value or influence of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system."  So if a given network goes from 50 users to 1000, it's not twenty times as valuable, but twenty-squared, or four hundred times as valuable.  While I may be taking this law a little beyond its original purview, it's the main reason that businesses whose essential function is to connect people and profit from their connections have a huge incentive to grow and take over absorb smaller networks.  It happened with Western Union, it happened with Ma Bell, and it happened with Facebook and YouTube. 

 

Much of what Hogg proposes to do to decentralize the Internet would directly threaten the network dominance of prominent social-media platforms.  If Facebook can't guarantee control over what their users see and do, including ads, then they won't be able to sell ads as easily, and their whole economic model is threatened.  If users are the product, they can't be allowed to just interconnect promiscuously and wander around and select exactly what experiences they want. 

 

In the face of this problem, I see one tiny little light that might be at the end of the tunnel.  Many of you may be familiar with a social-media platform called Nextdoor.  It runs Neighborhood Network, which Wikipedia calls a "hyperlocal" social networking service.  Compared to Meta, the $164-billion-revenue elephant that runs Facebook, Nextdoor is a $200-million mouse.  But speaking for myself, I have fallen into at least reading Nextdoor posts and occasionally finding useful information on them, mainly because they are literally from people next door, or at least in my immediate geographic area.  And I have nothing voluntarily to do with Facebook.  Yes, there are idiots on Nextdoor too, but there are also people I stand a good chance of actually seeing in the grocery store and getting to know better.  That virtually never happens on Facebook or the other centralized platforms.

 

Maybe some giant revolt will happen, and everybody will boycott the big boys in preference to decentralized social-media operations such as Nextdoor.  I agree with Hogg that decentralization would be great if we could get it to happen.  But the only way I can see it happening is if users insist on it, and keep insisting till it does.

 

Sources:  Luke Hogg's article "Building a Better Internet" appeared on pp. 24-26 of the April 2025 edition of National Review.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Metcalfe's Law, Nextdoor, and Meta. 

YouTube, COPPA, and Twelve-Year-Old Lawyers

YouTube, as anybody who is reading this online probably knows, is a video-streaming service owned by Google.  Because Google makes money from ads that go along with its services, it is in Google’s interest to make such services as easily accessible as possible to the most people.  Accessing YouTube requires only the ability to spell, or maybe even just to point on a smartphone screen to an icon.  Such skills are easily mastered by children as young as eight. 

In April of 2017, USA Today carried a story about an eight-year-old boy in Ohio who not only figured out how to watch YouTube, but learned how to drive a car by watching instructional videos.  He and his four-year-old sister waited until their parents were asleep one day.  Then they went out to the family car and drove to McDonald’s, where he used his piggy-bank money to buy a cheeseburger.  People who saw him on his way to the restaurant and called the cops when they figured out what was happening nevertheless said he obeyed all the traffic laws and didn’t hit a thing. 

COPPA stands for the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, a federal law that prohibits collecting online data from children under 13 without the consent of parents.  Last April, a coalition of childrens’ privacy protection groups filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that YouTube does indeed collect data from kids under 13—location, usage habits, and more.  And just last week, a pair of U. S. representatives, one Democrat and one Republican, wrote a letter to Google chair Sundar Pichai to ask him how his company uses data collected on those under 13.

The only substantive response from the company so far on these matters has been the following:  “Protecting kids and families has always been a top priority for us. Because YouTube is not for children, we've invested significantly in the creation of the YouTube Kids app to offer an alternative specifically designed for children. We appreciate all efforts to protect families and children online and look forward to working with members of Congress to answer their questions."

Of course, kids get into all sorts of things that aren’t intended for them, YouTube included.  The only barrier that keeps kids under 13 away from YouTube is item 12 in the YouTube Terms and Conditions, which reads in part, “In any case, you affirm that you are over the age of 13, as the Service is not intended for children under 13. If you are under 13 years of age, then please do not use the Service. There are lots of other great web sites for you. Talk to your parents about what sites are appropriate for you.”

A recent Roz Chast cartoon in The New Yorker portrayed an updated carnival freak-show sign, and one of the featured creatures was “The Man Who Actually Read the Terms and Conditions.”  If I had a twelve-year-old child who came to me and told me that she had dutifully read the YouTube terms and conditions, and said to me, “Paragraph 12 told me to talk to you about what sites are appropriate for me,” I’d tell her to go check out the Harvard Law School application page.  And then I’d probably never forgive myself for having raised a lawyer. 

Everyone, including the lawyers who wrote those terms and conditions, knows that the chances of a child actually reading Paragraph 12 and acting on it are indistinguishable from zero.  But technically and legally, YouTube has told precocious under-13 lawyers, and anyone else in that age category, that they shouldn’t be watching YouTube.  Presumably, the company’s default position on this issue is, “Well, we warned kids to stay away and not to lie to us about their age.  What else can we do?”

And that is the question.  Displaying content that is inappropriate for young children is bad enough, but collecting data on them is illegal—technically, according to COPPA.  But here again, we run into a legal fiction.  While there are all sorts of good laws on the books to prevent this sort of thing, laws are pointless unless they are enforced.  And as far as I know, the filing of the childrens’ privacy group complaint to the FTC has vanished into the federal bureaucracy, and Sundar Pichai has not yet replied to the letter from David Cicilline (D-Rhode Island) and Jeff Fortenberry (R-Nebraska). 

This whole situation begins to remind me disquietingly of a joke that was told about the way work got done in the old Soviet Union.  When a Western tourist asked a worker privately about conditions in a town in Siberia where the pay was low and the store shelves were almost empty, he replied, “Well, we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” 

YouTube pretends to keep children under 13 from watching it, and when that doesn’t work, the federal government and its representatives pretend to try to do something about it.  I normally don’t like sounding cynical, but sometimes the level of hypocrisy gets so high that you simply can’t ignore it.

I am not accusing either privacy groups or members of Congress of hypocrisy in this case.  Filing complaints and writing letters are sincere efforts to do something about the situation.  But so far, they appear to be just as ineffectual as YouTube’s Paragraph 12 in keeping kids from being exploited or having their innocence (remember innocence?) stripped from them. 

Every age has its public priorities—institutions and ways of doing things that are so accepted and even praised that they cannot be seriously challenged.  Slavery was one such priority until less than two hundred years ago, but that finally changed for the better.  Perhaps kids watching YouTube videos and having their data used by Google is not the worst thing that can happen to them.  But it’s one tip of the iceberg of this culture’s neglect and exploitation of children that will have long-term effects that we may not even understand for decades, let alone be able to do anything about. 

The first step toward righting a wrong is to recognize it as wrong.  A few people are questioning whether a giant corporation should get away with pretending it’s not doing something that it’s doing, at the expense of children.  And that is a good first step, but only the first step on a long journey.

Sources:  I referred to an article at https://www.multichannel.com/news/reps-press-google-on-kids-data-collection-issues entitled “Reps. Press Google on Kids Data Collection Issues” published on Sept. 17, 2018.  The quotation from a YouTube representative is from https://www.cnet.com/news/lawmakers-pressure-google-to-share-how-youtube-collects-uses-kids-data/ published on Sept. 18, 2018.  The story of the 8-year-old who taught himself to drive on YouTube is at

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/04/13/8-year-old-learns-drive-youtube-heads-mcdonalds/100408432/.  And in case you’re having trouble falling asleep, YouTube’s terms and conditions can be read in full at https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms. 

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Engineering Exemplar: Smarter Every Day's Destin Sandlin

An exemplar is an excellent model of something.  Engineering has its exemplars—people who excel at their work so well that it's worthwhile to point them out as good examples.  The aerospace engineer Destin Sandlin is an exemplar in a corner of engineering we don't think much about:  explaining engineering and science concepts to the general public.  Believe it or not, some of the ethics codes of engineering societies call for their members to do this.  Members of the IEEE (which used to stand for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers before they changed it to just the initials) are committed "to improve the understanding of technology; its appropriate application, and potential consequences." One engineer who is doing a lot in that direction right now is Destin Sandlin.

Mr. Sandlin has a graduate degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Alabama at Huntsville and works as a missile flight test engineer at the Redstone Arsenal.  Some time in the late 2000s, he posted a video on YouTube showing his friends how to light a bonfire with rockets.  They liked it so much that he started making more videos.  It's now a collection of videos he calls Smarter Every Day.  He's now up to No. 142, at least, and now has over two million subscribers and 24 videos that have received more than a million views each. 

What does he talk about?  All kinds of cool stuff involving technology, explained in a visually appealing way with well-produced graphics and a narration by Mr. Sandlin himself.  He is the opposite of the stereotypical inarticulate nerdy engineer, as you might expect from someone who won the University of Alabama's Outstanding Senior Award.  (Notice that's not Outstanding Engineering Major, but Outstanding Senior—period.)  I discovered his videos while searching for high-speed photography videos, and came upon one that dealt with a thing called a Prince Rupert's drop.  Go look at it to find out what it is—it has to do with dropping very hot glass into cold water.  I was impressed by his combination of clarity, technical correctness, and enthusiasm.  Plus which, he shows some really neat high-speed videos of how the thing works.

His videos aren't just all about technology—he gets into engineering ethics in a way too.  For example, one of his recent videos covers the three-in-a-row explosions of cargo-rocket launches that were intended to resupply the International Space Station.  Ever the optimist, his take on them is that if we were going to have some rockets blow up, this was the perfect time for it to happen, when the Space Station happens to have rather a surplus of food and before we start putting people on those rockets. 

Cameras that can take 100,000 frames per second aren't cheap, and I wondered how Mr. Sandlin pays for all the production expenses of his videos—green screens, high-quality graphics, and so on.  Well, several ways, it appears.  One is contributions—you can donate to his effort through a website called Patreon.  Another is advertising—some of the later videos have little ads at the end for various products (the one I saw boosted a book sold by Amazon).  And there's the revenue from the YouTube viewings.  He is up front about his hopes that Smarter Every Day will provide funds for his children's college education, and there's nothing wrong with that.  So he's an entrepreneur of a sort as well as an engineer, which is a good combination.

One thing that's fairly certain is that Mr. Sandlin hasn't gotten any money from the National Science Foundation.  If he had, they would have insisted that he have some kind of acknowledgment of the fact.  Over the years, I have been peripherally involved with NSF-sponsored efforts in the area of engineering education.  It turns out the kind of skills that enable one to raise or spend NSF education money are not always the kind of skills needed to appeal to a wide popular audience.  NSF would like both, of course, and every now and then, an NSF-sponsored project designed to explain or promote engineering to the general public actually gets a fair number of the general public to pay attention to it.  But successes like that are generally few and far between.

I would point out that Mr. Sandlin has no degree in education—or mass communication, for that matter.  All he had to start with is enthusiasm and a motivation to pay for his kids' college expenses.  And he's come up with something that presents engineering in a positive light to millions of people.  I'm not saying that government support for engineering education efforts directed at the general public is wasted, but Mr. Sandlin's work proves that it's not necessary, and the number of failed projects in that area proves that it's not sufficient, either.

One personal example of how not to do it will suffice here.  Years ago I made a misguided attempt to develop a kind of computer-based learning module for non-engineers.  I took a lot of NSF money and spent a whole summer at Cornell University with a grad student, learning how to use a very early version of development software for that kind of thing.  The project was used in an experimental course once, and that was that.  Clearly, it was not my forte.

Mr. Sandlin makes it look easy, but he says on his website that each video takes upwards of 100 hours to produce, and I believe him.  What he's doing deserves the support and encouragement of the engineering community, and so I encourage my readers to take a look at www.smartereveryday.com.  If you like what you see, let Mr. Sandlin know.  He's doing a good thing for engineering and the world.

Sources:  I encountered Mr. Sandlin's work in the form of his video on Prince Rupert's drops at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-f4gokRBs.  His video on the cargo-rocket explosions is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbabP9ttrZc.  His main website is www.smartereveryday.com, and I also referred to the Wikipedia article "Destin Sandlin."