Over the past few years, there’s been growing legal and academic interest in platforms — their functioning, potential harms, and advantages over competitors. On that last question, most of the literature that I’ve seen has focused on factors like network effects and access to data. However, a forthcoming book by Carliss Baldwin proposes some significant […]
The EU AI Act and emerging practice flip copyright’s default opt-in regime to an opt-out one. What effects is this likely to have on the balance of power between rights holders and reuse? Copyright is a default opt-in regime, from the standpoint of the rights holder. If I publish something on this blog, the presumption […]
More than twenty years ago, Web feeds were all the rage. Not proprietary news feeds on Facebook or ‘X’ – openly defined, direct producer-to-user feeds of information that you had total control over. Without ads. ‘Syndication’ meant that publishers could reach wider audiences without intermediaries; ‘aggregation’ meant that you could get updates from everyone you […]
It’s often assumed that standards work is inherently competitive. After all, the legal reason for Standards Developing Organisations (SDOs) to exist at all is as a shelter from prosecution for what would otherwise be anti-competitive behaviour.1 That description evokes images of hard-fought, zero-sum negotiation where companies use whatever dirty tricks they can to steer the […]
The phrase ‘Open Standards’ is widely used but not well-understood, to the point that the Open Source Initiative calls it ‘a feel-good term with no actual technical meaning.’ As we’ll see that’s an overstatement, but there are still significant confusion about and differences in what ‘open standard’ means in practice. Let’s take a look at […]
It’s common for voluntary technical standards developing organisations (SDOs such as the IETF and W3C) to make decisions by consensus, rather than (for example) voting. This post explores why we use consensus, what it is, how it works in Internet standards and when its use can become problematic. Why consensus? SDOs have several motivations for […]
