What’s really behind the “privacy controversies” at Facebook, Google, Uber, and Amazon?

Every interaction is part of a network and everyone governing those interactions is running a platform. We as humans have never had more ability to interact with each other and with technology, yet we’ve also never had less transparency about the rules that govern these interactions. Enter the platform; a set of rules to govern interactions.

Whether the interactions be social, e-commerce, transportation, supply chain, healthcare or even civic duty, the most valuable organizations today are those that are creating platforms to govern, adjudicate, influence and control these interactions.

Here comes Goliath, but where’s David?

Consumer-facing Goliaths like Facebook, Google, Uber and Amazon are the most obvious examples, but this logic applies to less obvious situations as well. Take for example advertising exchange platforms which govern real-time interactions between a website’s advertising space and the consumer brands who wish to reach a specific consumer profile or even a countries voting regime which governs interactions between citizens en masse and the individuals which ostensibly represent them.

As identities have become more disposable, bots have become more prevalent in our daily lives, and the line between on and offline has blurred, the role of adjudicators has become critical to the point where we rely on some form of platform to govern essentially every online and offline transaction in our lives.

Much like fiefdoms, with their own “laws” and “rules”

However the majority of these networks and platforms are controlled and governed by a small few who generally have vastly different incentives than those who are conducting the interactions that they are governing. Facebook’s equity holders are incented to create the most valuable, predictable users to sell their attention and information to advertisers or others and hit quarterly revenue targets, while a Facebook user is incented to create interesting content to generate likes, shares and follows to gain social value.

Similarly politicians are incentivized to use all legal means to stay in their short term elected position, while citizens are incented to try and improve their health, wealth and happiness over generations. These short-term vs. long-term and tangible vs. intangible incentive misalignments are almost universal in today’s platforms.

A shortage of transparency, the ultimate “currency”

If both sides are open and transparent about their incentives and actions, have access to similar information about what is happening on the platform and have similar ability to make changes to the rules and structure of the platform, then this divergence in incentives is not a big deal. Unfortunately Grandma, Zuck and the President, couldn’t have a higher level of disparity between them and that is both the critical problem and fatal flaw that is facing our current platform regime.

The biggest miss in this system is the lack of vision to understand that aligning with long-term and intangible incentives almost inevitably leads to superior short-term, tangible returns. But the short-term extractive policies of today’s biggest platforms means users of platforms have never been less happy with their situation. Without an evolution of the power disparity, we’re heading for a trust crash where users move “off the grid”, turn off data-feeds, stop voting and we lose the benefits of hundreds of years of connective evolution.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are the seeds of a new generation of open platforms and technologies aimed at evolving the platform paradigm to one of transparency, value share and universal governance representation. Sharing value with users via data revenue share, allowing users access to insights generated about them and their peers and help to understand who is trying to engage with them and why, rev share and benefits for service providers, collaborative governance, and abolition of unilateral platform expulsion or rule changes. A whole host of new open platform operating protocols are emerging.

Should we be rooting for “underdogs?”

It won’t be the incumbents that lead it, but it will start very rationally with the numbers five and six platforms in a space adopting these strategies in order to differentiate and compete. It won’t start with a radically open, perfectly transparent platform on day one, but it will start with a bill credit for a portion of the revenues generated with your data.

It won’t start with a massive increase in profits in Q1, but it will start with smart money investors recognizing that this is a new way to compete and that these are tomorrow’s unicorns. It won’t start with politicians abandoning questionable vote generating practices, but it will start with someone doing better than expected taking the multi-generational view over short term perks.

This is how it will start, but it won’t end until you the user demands better. We’re at a pivotal point where the speed of the world is increasing exponentially and our reliance on platforms to govern our interactions is at an all time high. If we don’t fix the infrastructure of our platforms we’re doomed to increasing individual irrelevance and commoditization. Platforms only have value because of their users.

The power truly is all with you the users collectively. Put in the effort to seek out platforms operating on open principals, demand transparency, demand value sharing, be willing to pay a nominal cost for apps, be ok with a slightly worse user experience in the early days, and look for representatives who are tech-focused, long-term thinking and understand this framework. Do all of this with the knowledge that by doing so you are making a powerful statement that the long-term matters and that there is more to be optimized for than dollars and cents.