What’s of interest? Creating a New Internet Bargain to Preserve Fair Use and Protect the Commons | TechPolicy.Press
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Our organizations, Public Knowledge and Creative Commons, share a vision of an open internet and a thriving and vital digital knowledge commons. Over the past year, we’ve come to share a growing concern: that the old bargain built on the open web — content from creators and publishers in exchange for acknowledgement and traffic from platforms — has broken down, and the values of reciprocity and sharing that have been essential to build and sustain a thriving knowledge commons have been abandoned.
This is most acute right now in the realm of generative artificial intelligence. Technology firms with highly concentrated power are expanding their role as information intermediaries, locking up data through exclusive agreements, at times ignoring access signals imposed by site owners, circumventing rate limits, or masking their origins. Online creators and publishers — collectively, rights holders — who feel their copyrighted content is being exploited are putting up their own defenses, including licenses, lawsuits, blocking, and attempts at legislation. The result is a fragmented information ecosystem, and an already-measurable decrease in the openness and availability of online information. The decrease in availability is compounded by threats to the quality of information in the knowledge commons. Research shows the more valuable the content — most often human-made — the more likely it is to be held back.
Underlying all of this is an emerging new exchange model for the web — a new internet bargain — that without intervention may result in the closing of the commons for even the most beneficial uses. AI model developers and online rights holders should be motivated — and, where necessary, incented or required by policymakers — to change these trends.
This post outlines the forces that are threatening the digital knowledge commons. These include extractive enclosure — the commodification of human knowledge resources as free raw materials by dominant technology actors — and defensive enclosure — restrictions or demands imposed by online rights holders in self-protection against what they perceive as exploitation. We also outline the dynamics that are poisoning the knowledge commons. We show how, combined, these dynamics are creating a new, unsustainable economic bargain for the open web that may benefit large AI model developers and online rights holders while shutting out everybody else. Lastly, we propose a set of principles for developing solutions to address the impact of these forces on the knowledge commons.
Where is it?: Creating a New Internet Bargain to Preserve Fair Use and Protect the Commons | TechPolicy.Press
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