For those of you who are not football fans, we’re coming up on Super Bowl season. And, yes, that will surely mean that we will eventually do some posting on the ridiculous way in which the NFL enforces the trademark rights it has, and indeed some it does not have, for the Super Bowl. But this is actually about an entirely different trademark, one that will be widely discussed more and more depending on just how deep into the playoffs the Kansas City Chiefs get.
Apparel companies and the like in Kansas City are already starting to both talk and educate themselves about the term “three-peat”. If the Chiefs were able to win the Super Bowl this year, it would be for the third consecutive year in a row. That is commonly called a “three-peat” in sports parlance. Less common is the knowledge that the term is actually trademarked and has been for decades.
It’s no secret that Chiefs Kingdom is hoping and even preparing for the Chiefs to pull off a three-peat, but if you’re planning on getting gear with that phrase you may run into trouble. It may come as a surprise to some, but the phrase ‘three-peat’ and ‘3-peat’ is trademarked, meaning local businesses won’t be able to put it on their merchandise.
“I mean what else would you call it?” asked Greg Lewis, manager for merchandise company Raygun.
Shops like Raygun and Made Mobb, known for their out of the box and unique merch, will now have to get extra creative if the Chiefs score a third consecutive Super Bowl victory.
“We did not know that three-peat was trademarked so thank you for informing us,” said Jesse Phouangphet, the Marketing Director for Made Mobb.
So, who has a registered trademark for “three-peat” and several of its variations? Pat Riley, that’s who. For those of you who don’t follow the NBA, Riley is one of the most legendary coaches and front office executives in NBA history. While coaching the Lakers in the 80s, he trademarked the term, despite acknowledging it wasn’t coined by him, as he was attempting to take the Lakers to their third consecutive title. The Lakers would go on to lose that season, but Riley had his trademark any way. Over the years, his company, Riles & Co., would maintain those trademarks. And, to fulfill the requirement that the marks be used in commerce, the company would produce a handful of hilariously bad products using the phrase.
But the company’s real business is purely in licensing the term whenever some team out there wins 3 titles in a row and they, or third parties, develop merch around the term. When the Bulls three-peated twice in the 90s, ironically by beating Riley teams along the way, Riley cashed in. When the Yankees won the World Series in ’98, ’99, and ’00, Riley cashed in. And, presumably, if the Chiefs win a 3rd consecutive Super Bowl, Riley will attempt to cash in on that, too.
Notably, Riley’s trademark has been challenged several times over the years. And it’s not hard to understand why. In the sports world, outside of commerce, the term is fairly ubiquitous to the point of being generic. The fact that relatively few people associate the term at all with Riley or his business drives the point home that’s it does a trash job of being a source identifier. And it’s fanciful nature mostly amounts to it being a portmanteau, and not a particular creative one at that. To that extent, it’s also fairly descriptive in nature.
Sadly, none of the challenges to date have worked, and the term is still locked up under trademark by Riley. So prepare yourself to hear all about an old NBA executive if the Chiefs make a deep playoff run, as annoying as that will be.
I know that Mark Zuckerberg no longer likes fact-checking, but it’s not going to stop me from continuing to fact-check him. I’m going to rate his claimed plans of moving trust & safety and content moderation teams away from California to Texas as not just an obnoxiously stupid political suck-up, but also something that increasingly appears to be just a flat out lie.
As you may recall, as part of Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to do away with fact-checking, enable more hatred, and just generally suck up to the Trump administration, there was the weird promise that because California content moderation and trust & safety teams were too “biased,” they would be moved to Texas.
Texas is, apparently, famous for its unbiased, neutral residents, as compared to California, where it is constitutionally impossible to be unbiased. Or something.
Former Facebook employees say, however, that the move-to-Texas announcement rings hollow. That’s because Meta already has major content moderation and trust and safety operations in the state. They say the move is nothing more than a blatant appeal to Donald Trump. Facebook’s former head of content standards said he helped set up those teams in Texas more than a decade ago.
“They made a lot of hay of: ‘Oh, we’re worried about bias, we’re moving all these content moderation teams to other places,’” Dave Willner said during a Lawfare panel last week. “As far as I’ve been able to figure out, that is mostly fake.”
Three other former Facebook employees who worked on the trust and safety teams in Texas told the Guardian the same. One said many people across Meta’s various divisions did trust and safety work in the company’s Austin offices. Another said that many content moderators, including those allocated to the trust and safety teams, have been in Austin for a long time.
So many of the people were already in Texas. What about the folks in California who were told they’d have to move? According to Wired, most have been told the mandate doesn’t actually apply to them.
Last Thursday during a town hall call for Meta employees working under Guy Rosen, the company’s chief information security officer, executives said that no one in Rosen’s organization would have to move to Texas, according to two people in attendance. This exempts from relocation employees who work on Meta’s safety, operations, and integrity teams, which collectively help enforce the company’s content policies.
The changes also do not affect a portion of Meta’s US-based content policy team, which works under chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, because many members are already located outside of California, including in Washington, DC, New York City, and Austin, Texas, the employees say. That includes key decisionmakers such as Neil Potts, vice president of public policy. Many of the company’s content moderators are contractors based out of hubs beyond California such as San Antonio, Texas.
So it sure sounds like the big announcement of how content moderation and trust & safety were moving to Texas was a load of garbage. Many of those people are already there.
The whole thing, as expected, was about making a fake public concession to Donald Trump in an attempt to curry political favor.
While Zuckerberg’s motivations here seem transparently political, the broader implications remain concerning. It’s especially worrying given how a ton of people are going around falsely claiming Zuckerberg caved to pressure from Biden, while everyone seems to be ignoring the much more blatant act of him actually caving to Trump.
Moving critical trust & safety functions to appease partisan interests sets a troubling precedent. It’s a short-sighted move that prioritizes political expediency over principled policymaking. But that’s the world Mark Zuckerberg has chosen to embrace.
Even though the Supreme Court somehow didn’t agree, the ban on TikTok remains unconstitutional garbage for all the reasons we’vediscussed: its impact on the platform itself, the impact on its users, and its impact on other service providers that help it work. The corrupt scramble we’ve seen to try to keep it going, ever since it went into effect, only provides more evidence for why it was exactly the sort of law the Constitution should have prohibited.
But in the wake of TikTok v. Garland, here we are, with TikTok still basically shut down — or at least without the partners it needs to work properly. Or protect its users, because as long as it’s not in the app stores users cannot get software updates, thus leaving every phone with it installed extremely vulnerable to unpatched zero day exploits. Which, of course, is yet another reason the “Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act” was unconstitutionally bad policy that never should have been allowed by anyone (as well as very poorly named).
But the Executive Order Trump just issued to forestall the law’s enforcement doesn’t solve the problem. There is still a law on the books that sanctions TikTok, as well as anyone who helps TikTok provide its services. Trump has no authority to set aside the law. Nor does he have the authority to delay its enforcement – the law articulates a small avenue by which he could, but the criteria that would give him this power has not been met (it would have required TikTok to be much further along with divesting itself).
Instead the Executive Order creates new problems. Because here is Trump trying to claim an unprecedented amount of raw power to decide whether or not to enforce the law. But that lawlessness he’s demonstrating can offer no protection from law. It can offer no protection from anything. And Google and Apple and any of the other providers TikTok needs would be fools to pretend otherwise.
Just run the math: Trump wants these companies to be in his debt. From at least some, like Google, he’s already extracted at least a million dollars in tithes “for his inauguration.” But there’s nothing to limit him from continuing to extract millions more. Meanwhile, if any of these companies serve TikTok they will be staring down a sanction of potentially more than 500 billion dollars (the penalty, especially for the app stores, is $5000 per TikTok user, and even for the other providers it’s still $500 per user). So if the way to avoid that penalty is to depend on Trump’s arbitrary benevolence, Trump could extract up to $499,999,999,999 from each of them, and that’s just to maybe avoid them getting in trouble for violating this law. Stay tuned for what other laws get put on the books next, especially now that the constitutional limits on them have been so relaxed.
At that point it would have long been more cost effective to just help elect Democrats and pay taxes like a normal company hoping to profit from Americans’ business.
Trump’s promise not to enforce is also as void as it is arbitrary and autocratic. As it is, the text of the executive order, at Section 3(c), instructs that no one should rely on it:
This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
It may be boilerplate that shows up in a lot of executive orders, but it’s still sitting there, in this one, having effect.
As a result the only choice these companies have is not whether to serve TikTok again or not; that choice got made for them by the stupid law, which decided for them that they cannot. Their only choice is whether to silently obey the law, or to fight it.
This law is jawboning and affects its own interests in a way that even Trump himself has recognized is unconstitutional. As has the Supreme Court. Furthermore, the extraordinary, distorting penalties also present their own constitutional concerns, which is an issue the courts have yet to address in this context.
In the face of this unconstitutionality the companies should have fought already, but with this actual injury to the companies now so proximate and likely, they probably still can, or at least plausibly try. And they should. Not only would doing so be in their own immediate legal interests, but their business ones as well. Because as long as the public sees these big tech companies as being in Trump’s pocket, no one will trust them again. But government contracts aside, their businesses still depend on that public trust, whether by customers, investors, or other regulators still able to sink their own teeth into them. It’s time to earn that trust by saying no to any of these abuses of power, for their sake and everyone’s.
One of the many new executive orders signed by President Donald Trump on Monday was the long-hyped creation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE is portrayed as a sort of government efficiency and innovation office, but it’s primarily flimsy cover for the extraction class as they eliminate corporate oversight, consumer protection, labor rights, and the social safety net.
The program was supposed to be spearheaded by two of the country’s biggest bloviating weirdos, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. Ramaswamy is already leaving the agency because he purportedly wants to take a shot at becoming the Governor of Ohio (though other reports suggest he somehow managed to annoy most of the people at a fake government agency already filled with annoying people).
DOGE has other issues already as well. While it’s not a real government agency, it does appear to qualify as a federal advisory committee (FACA). And FACAs do have documentation, transparency, and other rules they have to follow, including producing meeting minutes, filing a Charter with Congress, having “fairly balanced” ideological representation, and maintaining some semblance of public open access.
Not surprisingly, Musk’s fake government efficiency agency has allegedly done none of those things, resulting in several new lawsuits that may or may not result in any reform of note.
One of the lawsuits was filed by the The American Public Health Association, the American Federation of Teachers, Minority Veterans of America, VoteVets Action Fund, Center for Auto Safety, and CREW. It calls DOGE a “shadow operation led by unelected billionaires who stand to reap huge financial rewards from this influence and access.”
“Plaintiffs and those they represent believe that the government should work for the American people and be transparent, efficient, and effective – and that the government can and should do better,” the complaint states.
Another lawsuit, filed by Public Citizen, filed in conjunction with the American Federation of Government Employees, also alleges the fake government agency is playing fast and loose with government rules.
Yet another lawsuit, filed by National Security Counselors, also points out how the setup of DOGE seems wholly disconnected from how the government is supposed to work.
It’s clear DOGE supporters (including lots of corporate backed deregulatory “innovation” think tanks) want to have their cake and eat it too. They want DOGE to be respected as a serious thing, while simultaneously having to do none of the serious things adults have to do to be taken seriously in the world of government policy:
“Sam Hammond, senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, who has been supportive of DOGE’s efforts, said the initiative will primarily implement ideas within the executive branch and White House, which he said would exempt it from FACA requirements. If Trump does treat DOGE as a FACA, then it should follow the required reporting rules. But for now, he said, “DOGE isn’t a federal advisory committee because DOGE doesn’t really exist. DOGE is a branding exercise, a shorthand for Trump’s government reform efforts.”
When announced, the press went out of its way to frame DOGE as a very serious thing. Of course it’s mostly a vehicle for access (read: corruption). And a way to put a lazy shine on what will be a brutal and very harmful dismantling of federal consumer protection, labor rights, environmental law, and social safety programs, which will result in very real suffering at unprecedented scale.
Musk himself admits this suffering is coming, but hopes he can bedazzle a lazy press with enough bullshit that they softsell and downplay the broad, percussive looming harms to the American public. Meanwhile fake government official Musk is already walking back claims that his fake government efficiency agency would drive some two trillion in overall government savings.
You’re supposed to ignore the fact that this is because the stuff usually most in need of cutting — fat and purposeless corporate subsidies (see: the Starlink kerfuffle) and the bottomless well of military and intelligence overbilling — are precisely the sort of stuff billionaire extraction class parasites enjoy glomming on to. The stuff deemed “inefficient” is the stuff that doesn’t benefit them personally.
This post was written on Sunday. By the time you read it there may have been 12,492 further unconstitutional TikTok-related hijinks since then, but because this particular kind of unconstitutional violation might well rear its ugly head again, if not with respect to TikTok then with respect to something else, it’s still worth pointing out the problem, even if how it applies to TikTok may have been obviated by even stupider deviations from the Constitution since.
There was an argument left on the table in the TikTokbriefs at the Supreme Court: The ban, among its many unconstitutional flaws, was also unconstitutional jawboning. And Supreme Court precedent from just last year explained why.
In NRA v. Vullo the Court made clear that the government can’t go after a speaker it doesn’t like by pressuring an intermediary the speaker needs to deal with as a way of sticking it to the speaker. And yet, with the TikTok ban, that’s exactly what Congress did: impose liability on the intermediary services TikTok needs to deal with to run if they help TikTok run.
Just look at how the statute is written, and where the prohibition is. Right there, in its first main provision at Section 2(a) (and Section 1 is just the short title of the law), here’s what the law says:
It shall be unlawful for an entity to distribute, maintain, or update (or enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of) a foreign adversary controlled application by carrying out, within the land or maritime borders of the United States, any of the following:
And then it describes what these other non-TikTok third parties cannot do, namely host the app in its app stores:
(A) Providing services to distribute, maintain, or update such foreign adversary controlled application (including any source code of such application) by means of a marketplace (including an online mobile application store) through which users within the land or maritime borders of the United States may access, maintain, or update such application.
Or provide any sort of server support:
(B) Providing internet hosting services to enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of such foreign adversary controlled application for users within the land or maritime borders of the United States.
It is this unconstitutional statutory construction that, ironically, is why Trump can’t easily fix this mess without making a bigger one. Because even if he promises not to go after TikTok, he still hasn’t solved the problem because the law’s teeth are not just biting TikTok but anyone helping the app work. And they are sharp teeth, threatening billions in penalties:
An entity that violates subsection (a) shall be subject to pay a civil penalty in an amount not to exceed the amount that results from multiplying $5,000 by the number of users within the land or maritime borders of the United States determined to have accessed, maintained, or updated a foreign adversary controlled application as a result of such violation.
So in the cross-hairs of this law are Google and Apple, which host the app in their app stores,* but also anyone else who provides any sort of services, like perhaps Amazon, if the app is using their cloud services, and potentially CDNs that help handling the data load, and possibly services that help with transmission like backbone providers and wireless telcos if its services are used to connect end users to the service (even if this law omits them with its focus on “hosting,” and it’s not entirely clear that it does, the next law could easily catch them)… The degree of corrupt abdication of his obligation to enforce the law as Chief Executive of the United States needed to save TikTok is significantly greater than if he just needed to universally exempt TikTok from this law, because he’d have to exempt them all.
It does, of course, beg the question as to why any of these affected entities did not sue to challenge the law themselves, because the law is about them. And this sort of impermissible jawboning is going to keep affecting them as intermediaries, again and again, until there is finally enough pushback to take this unconstitutional weapon out of the government’s regulatory quiver.
But that they even needed to is another reason why jawboning is bad. The government put these companies in a position they were not supposed to find themselves in, where they couldn’t freely exercise their own rights as service providers because the government didn’t like a user of their services. And to vindicate their own right they would have to expend the costs associated with litigation as well as the risk of painting yourself as a target for a government that has shown itself to be vindictive to technology platforms it doesn’t like. It was probably a lot more expedient just to refuse service to TikTok and somehow hope that the government does not start to pick off, one by one, everyone else they provide service to with other laws later…
Of course, given the other constitutional problems facially manifest in the TikTok ban, they may have thought it unnecessary, as surely TikTok’s challenge should have been enough. And while they probably should have shown up as amici to help, and in doing so point out this jawboning problem, the rushed briefing during the holidays may have well made such participation in the litigation, at least at the Supreme Court, functionally impossible.
Perhaps TikTok should have raised the jawboning issue itself – as it is it doesn’t seem like the NRA v. Vullo case was even cited in its Supreme Court briefs – but in its briefs it only had so many words it could include and so much time to write them. And the arguments it did bring to bear should have been availing on their own.
But maybe it’s just as well: while it’s bad enough that the Court has backed off of supporting the First Amendment’s protections in all the ways it just did, it would be even worse if it had also backed off of its protective precedent in this context too.
* We also should be concerned about the cybersecurity risk that comes from pressuring app stores to disable distribution of app updates, leaving users to run only outdated software on their phones, but that’s a subject for another post…
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Disclosure:I’m onthe board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, even though part of this is cheering on a new entrant looking to build an alternative to Bluesky.
There’s been some debate over the last year or so regarding Bluesky and how decentralized it really is. There has also been a growing fear that “enshittification is inevitable.” Or, worse, that an “evil billionaire” might take it over and ruin it the way other platforms have been ruined.
But I think it’s important to understand that Bluesky has, effectively, created a technological poison pill: by building on an open protocol, ATprotocol, the system itself can be rebuilt outside of Bluesky, but in a way where everyone can continue to communicate, and that creates incredible incentives that undermine any evil billionaires, and would actually punish Bluesky (or anyone else!) should they try to enshittify.
Last week, a group called Free Our Feeds announced itself to the world and kicked off a crowdfunding process to effectively build a Bluesky competitor, built on the same ATprotocol and fully interoperable with Bluesky, but wholly separate from the app.
This is both exciting and fantastic, in part because it’s cool, and in part because it demonstrates the real-world impact and importance of ATprotocol’s open design, showing how it enables the creation of alternative infrastructure that can prevent lock-in and empower users.
The Enshittification Fear:
For a few years now, Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” has been a hot topic in tech circles, with many worried that even the most well-intentioned platforms are doomed to become terrible over time.
Indeed, just a few months ago, Cory wrote a thoughtful piece about why he was not joining Bluesky and why he feared it was on the path to enshittification. He and I had actually discussed all of this much earlier (very early in Bluesky’s history) and I suggested to him that Bluesky had some tricks up its sleeve to be enshittification-resistant. In the piece, Cory says some very nice things about me before (correctly!) saying that even though he trusts me deeply, he doesn’t think that his trust of me (and me being on Bluesky’s board) means Bluesky is immune to the enshittification curve:
Bluesky has many federated features that I find technically admirable. I only know the CEO there slightly, but I have nothing but good opinions of her. At least one of the board members there, Mike Masnick, is one of my oldest friends and comrades in the fights for user rights. We don’t agree on everything, but I trust him implicitly and would happily give him the keys to my house if he needed a place to stay or even the password for my computer before I had major surgery.
But even the best boards can make bad calls.
And he’s correct. The best boards can make bad calls. And I can certainly make bad calls.
But the secret behind Bluesky was not that it has an amazing CEO or a non-evil board. It’s that it was built from the ground up with a focus on forced openness and a protocol on which anyone could build. I discussed this in great detail a few months ago on Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast.
The key points:
Nothing can be enshittification-proof, but you can make things enshittification resistant.
The key to doing so is building on a forced-open protocol, such that if people hate what you’re doing, they’re able to rebuild any part of the infrastructure and cut out the entity engaged in enshittification.
Even if the alternative competing services don’t exist, the simple fact that the option is there for people to keep their content, keep their relationships, keep their ability to communicate while avoiding any particular platform, is a very strong incentive to resist enshittification.
This is because even the looming possibility that someone can come in, piggyback on the existing network, but with their own infrastructure, creates incredibly strong incentives for any player in the space to avoid giving reasons to people to leave.
Going back to Cory’s original formulation of “enshittification,” I can explain this further:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
In traditional, centralized systems that shift away from being good to users to being good to their business customers is where the slide begins. For traditional companies, though, they can get away with it, because users are “stuck.” As Cory well knows from his work on adversarial interoperability, the real problem is lock-in.
Once a platform has you, it can start to squeeze you if you have nowhere else to go. And, in the case of social media, that’s particularly tricky, because you want to be where your social graph is, so once you’ve really built up connections, a platform has you.
But if the network is based on an open protocol, in which alternative infrastructure can be built, then any player in the system has a greatly diminished incentive to start being bad to users in favor of other constituents, because the worse you get for users, the more opportunity there is for someone else to jump in and offer something better.
I think that many people, though not necessarily Cory, have zeroed in on the idea of “VC funding” as the root cause of enshittification, rather than the lock-in. And it is true that some VCs might be looking to invest only in centralized platforms that have built-in lock-in, but it’s possible to recognize an alternative approach to building a sustainable business: by treating users well, allowing everyone to build on the same open network, and recognizing that this makes the whole system more valuable to everyone.
That’s what Bluesky is trying to do with the ATprotocol.
The company has said from the beginning that “Bluesky” itself is just a reference app, and the point is for others to build. Indeed, part of the company’s own mission is that “the company is a future adversary.”
As Cory notes, no CEO or board can protect against that. But building an open network that enables third parties to build every bit of the stack as alternatives does help protect against that.
Free Our Feeds!
And now it’s happening. With the launch of Free Our Feeds, which is running a crowdfunding project and looking to raise $30 million over the next three years, we’re seeing that fully independent infrastructure on the path to being built. And hopefully they won’t be the only ones.
The plan is to build entirely separate infrastructure, but all using the ATprotocol, so that anyone on Bluesky (or other ATproto services) can interoperate with the new service.
Bluesky is an opportunity to shake up the status quo. They have built scaffolding for a new kind of social web. One where we all have more say, choice and control.
But it will take independent funding and governance to turn Bluesky’s underlying tech—the AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app. We want to create an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart.
Free Our Feeds will build a new, independent foundation to help make that happen.
This isn’t just about bolstering one new social media platform. Our vision offers a pathway to an open and healthy social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any company or billionaire.
And, notably, among the names signed on to support it is Cory Doctorow, which is exciting to see.
This ability to build alternative infrastructure is possible (despite Cory’s fears in his piece), it just takes resources. Cory talked about the lack of “federation” in his piece, suggesting that Bluesky had somehow failed to “federate”:
Bluesky lacks the one federated feature that is absolutely necessary for me to trust it: the ability to leave Bluesky and go to another host and continue to talk to the people I’ve entered into community with there. While there are many independently maintained servers that provide services to Bluesky and its users, there is only one Bluesky server. A federation of multiple servers, each a peer to the other, has been on Bluesky’s roadmap for as long as I’ve been following it, but they haven’t (yet) delivered it.
And while it is true that Bluesky is, currently, the only source for some aspects of the ATprotocol stack, it has been built so that the other parts can be replicated elsewhere. Admittedly, some of it is more complicated than other parts, but it is possible.
And that’s what the new Free Our Feeds effort is trying to do.
So while Cory was worried that this was something Bluesky had refused to do, the reality is that the possibility of doing this has been there for a while. The problem is that it’s not simple. And it needed someone else to come along and build what was open for them to build.
Because if Bluesky built it itself, then it’s not a third party that is independent. It’s still Bluesky. And that’s why Free Our Feeds is so exciting. They’re proving that a third party can build out a system entirely independent of Bluesky, the company. And, admittedly, building the full stack is not cheap, which explains why Free Our Feeds is working towards an ambitious funding goal.
The ability for a third party like Free Our Feeds to build an entirely separate system while still allowing users to communicate across apps is the key to ATprotocol’s “technological poison pill” effect. Even if Bluesky or another provider tries to act against users’ interests, people can seamlessly shift to an alternative without losing access to their social graph and data. This creates a powerful counterweight to the usual lock-in and network effects that enable enshittification.
The Company is a Future Adversary
And this is where it’s important to understand some of the fundamental differences in how something like Bluesky/ATproto works and something like Mastodon/ActivityPub work. They have a slightly different approach to trying to tackle the same problem. Each are trying to create decentralized, protocol-based social media tools, but they take a fundamentally different approach.
ActivityPub works on the theory that almost anyone can effectively build and host “their own” mini-Twitter-like service. And then that mini-Twitter can speak to many of the other mini-Twitters, with the ability of any of them to “defederate” (or block all communications) with other mini-Twitters, as needed.
That defederation aspect is a unique (and fascinating!) kind of incentivizing tool, as platforms that want to be good neighbors have incentives to police their own mini-Twitters. But it also creates some challenges. It’s tough to run your own mini-Twitter, especially if you allow more than just yourself to use it. There’s a fair bit of work involved. And then managing users, managing which servers you defederate from, etc., is a chore.
The ATProtocol approach is somewhat different. You can federate some aspects of things, such as hosting all your own data on your own PDS or Personal Data Server (which is great, as it means you have full control over your data, not Bluesky or anyone else), but it’s not designed for a random individual to spin up an entire mini-Twitter.
The philosophy is more that different parts of the stack may require different players to be involved, and some of them may require more resources than others. Running your own PDS is relatively inexpensive and easy. Running your own relay is more challenging and expensive but wouldn’t necessarily need a corporation. Other pieces require more, and that’s what Free Our Feeds appears to be building.
And, again, the most important bit is that this is always possible on this network. Because “the company is a future adversary.”
Bluesky’s approach directly addresses the enshittification fear by ensuring that no single entity, not even Bluesky itself, can gain too much control over the network. The open protocol acts as a check on any potential abuse of power.
The fact that Free Our Feeds can do this in the first place is almost more important than whether or not they actually succeed (which I hope they do!), because it creates strong incentives for Bluesky, the corporate entity, not to enshittify.
Indeed, if you look back at the history of Twitter, in the early days, it encouraged open development and building, but it wasn’t a protocol where the entire stack could be recreated. And, when one entity started buying up many of the independent developers with a pretty explicit plan to “steal away” all of Twitter’s users, Twitter started locking stuff up and blocking that ability, because there wasn’t an open protocol and there wasn’t any possibility of rebuilding certain parts of the infrastructure.
In contrast, Bluesky was built from the ground up for this very thing. And you can see that difference in how the Bluesky team has reacted to Free Our Feeds: many employees, including top management, are cheering on the Free Our Feeds team even as, ostensibly, they’re building “a competitor.”
Exciting to see new, independent projects spin up to decentralize the atproto ecosystem! Building alternative infrastructure is a big step towards giving users more choice and making the network billionaire-proof.
Free Our Feeds! What is it! @freeourfeeds.comF.O.F. is an independent group with the goal of running THIS👇 social network totally outside of Bluesky.It's not us. It's a fully independent version of the network. All the same users and posts. Running cooperatively with us and others.
very excited to have other large players taking the decentralization of atproto infrastructure seriouslylooking forward to seeing what comes out of this!
This sincere welcoming of potential “competitors” is practically unheard of in the tech world. But it reflects a fundamentally different mindset enforced by the open protocol, one focused on growing the pie for everyone rather than jealously guarding a slice. It’s a recognition that, in a world of open protocols, a rising tide can lift all boats.
Of course, some may argue that the technical complexity and costs involved in building out alternative infrastructure will still limit how many can truly compete with dominant players, even with an open protocol. And that’s a fair point. Spinning up a full social media stack is no trivial task, as the $30 million Free Our Feeds campaign underscores.
But the key is that it’s possible, and that possibility acts as a check on bad behavior. Moreover, as a robust ecosystem emerges around the protocol, we can expect to see more tools and services that lower the barriers to entry. Already, the rapid pace of development and the ease of building new user experiences on top of ATProtocol hint at a future where a vibrant alternative tech scene, with empowered users, can thrive.
It’s a recognition that, in the networked world, this can be a non-zero-sum situation, and having more players building makes it better for everyone. It also allows for different kinds of experiments, which will create more features that more people are interested in. It’s an approach that is focused on making sure the whole ecosystem grows, rather than one company’s fiefdom.
Get Busy Building
Along those lines, there’s been a lot more development going on elsewhere as well, which is equally exciting. In just the last week, there’s been talk of independent developers building an Instagram competitor and a TikTok competitor on ATprotocol. That last one, by the way, was built in just a few hours. That’s what can happen when you have an open system. Over the weekend, Bluesky itself added to this by soft launching a new view that gives the service a TikTok-like feel. But, again, in an open way such that others can build algorithms and feeds for a similar video-only feed.
Similarly, Flipboard recently released an amazingly slick brand new app, called Surf, that works with both ATprotocol and ActivityPub (and RSS!!) to create a very cool tool for browsing, consuming, sharing, and creating posts across all of these networks. And last week, right after the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok ban, Flipboard’s CEO/co-founder Mike McCue showed off SkyTok, a quickly created feed (using Surf) that creates a simple TikTok-like experience. And, over the weekend, they tested SkyTok with Bluesky’s new video rendering setup as well.
And people are taking notice. Famed entrepreneur/investor Mark Cuban put out a call for proposals, saying he’d like to fund a TikTok competitor built on ATProtocol, so I imagine the links above won’t be the only examples of people building cool stuff.
Most of these alternative apps are really building different looks at Bluesky’s implementation of ATprotocol, rather than a fully independent stack. Think of it as services that build on-top of Gmail. But that’s also why the Free Our Feeds effort is so cool. It’s like someone is coming along and building an Outlook to compete with Gmail. And, assuming they’re successful, these alternative apps (like the TikTok-style apps) should be able to easily work with it as well. Or any other third party that builds out the infrastructure.
This is a case where the more people building on this open protocol and open network, the more it helps everyone.
And, it does so in a way that is still easy for people to use. Most users don’t need to know any of this is happening, or about ATprotocol in the background. It’s just creating the kind of more open web that we all need, without the lock-in.
Again, it’s that lock-in that creates the eventual enshittification. Without lock-in, any app could still enshittify, but the risks for that app would be much bigger, because it’s so easy for users to exit. It won’t be like leaving Twitter for Bluesky where you are effectively “starting over,” it will basically be “Oh, I don’t like how Bluesky is acting, so I’m just switching over to the Free Our Feeds system” where… you don’t lose any of your posts (they’re in your own PDS), you don’t lose any of your connections (your social graph is really yours), and you remain in full control.
This is what the early internet promised us, but it got lost in the early 2000s when big companies came along and effectively colonized open protocols (or recreated them as closed silos with nicer user interfaces). This time around, though, people are learning to create user-friendly interfaces with open protocols.
From Ulysses Pacts to Technological Poison Pills
In Cory’s piece, he talks about the concept of the Ulysses Pact, which is what he requires of any new service:
There’s a name for this dynamic, from the world of behavioral economics. It’s called a “Ulysses Pact.” It’s named for the ancient hacker Ulysses, who ignored the normal protocol for sailing through the sirens’ sea. While normie sailors resisted the sirens’ song by filling their ears with wax, Ulysses instead had himself lashed to the mast, so that he could hear the sirens’ song, but could not be tempted into leaping into the sea, to be drowned by the sirens.
Whenever you take a measure during a moment of strength that guards against your own future self’s weakness, you enter into a Ulysses Pact.
He argued that Bluesky didn’t have that because it hadn’t “federated.” But it had. It had locked the protocol open so that anyone could build. And now they are.
I think a better way of thinking about this isn’t the “Ulysses Pact,” but rather a technological poison pill. I had seen some people saying on Bluesky that the company needed to create some sort of “poison pill” in its financial setup to ward off evil potential buyers who might “make an offer they can’t refuse.”
But what Bluesky has done with ATproto is even better: it’s not relying on some financial contract. It’s created a technological poison pill, such that even if Bluesky (the company) was offered a deal it couldn’t refuse, others could just rebuild the stack… outside of Bluesky’s control (but where users could continue to communicate with each other), and Bluesky could do nothing to stop them.
Beyond enabling the “easy exit” Cory wants, it also acts to ward off “evil billionaires,” because as soon as they act evil, the poison pill is there to give everyone an escape route, thereby effectively destroying any evil billionaire’s plans. An evil billionaire has less reason to be evil in the first place since alternatives can spring up and users can exit without cost.
The “Ulysses Pact” here is in the setup. Evil billionaires and enshittification become self-defeating, thanks to the poison pill. That’s not to say it’s impossible. Because you never know what bad decisions some future version (future adversary) might make. But the nature of the locked open protocol means that it’s much easier to deal with that, and that simple fact should hopefully disincentivize any attempts in the first place.
If this approach succeeds, it won’t just protect individual users; it has the potential to reshape the fundamental dynamics of the social web. By reducing the power of walled gardens and returning control to users, an ecosystem of open protocols could realign the incentives of technology companies, ensuring that they prioritize serving their users’ interests to remain competitive. It would mark a major shift back towards the original decentralized vision of the internet.
The rapid pace of development and the ease of building new user experiences on top of ATprotocol are not just exciting for their own sake. They hint at a future where a vibrant ecosystem of interoperable “small tech” can thrive, with a diverse range of user-centric services emerging to meet different needs. Rather than being limited to a handful of monolithic platforms, internet users could enjoy a rich marketplace of apps and services, all built on shared open standards.
That’s the vision I had with my Protocols, not Platforms paper, and now it’s on its way to being truly real. Having the Free Our Feeds folks jump in is not just proof that this is possible, it’s a vote of confidence for the overall setup, and shows how we can actually build enshittification-resistant systems by locking them open as a technological poison pill against lock-in and against the threats of evil billionaires.
If this approach succeeds, it won’t just protect users; it will fundamentally reshape the dynamics of the social web. It will bring us back towards the original promise of the open web where users are in control, rather than giant companies. Companies will still have a place, but the job of platforms will be to serve the users’ best interests first and foremost.
Last year U.S. broadband giant Verizon faced yet another class action lawsuit for sleazy, misleading fees. This latest $100 million class action alleged that Verizon for years ripped off its customers via a $3 (and up) “Administrative and Telco Recovery Charge” that it tacked at the bottom of user bills to help the company falsely advertise a lower price at the point of sale.
Verizon ultimately settled the lawsuit last October. But whereas class action participants were promised payouts between $15 and $100, many Reddit posters say they were lucky to see $6 or $7:
“I got 5.77! We should put our money together and buy a billboard outside Verizon with a picture of a middle finger on it.”
Countless cable and broadband companies tack on a myriad of completely bogus fees below the line, letting them advertise one rate — then sock you with a higher rate once your bill actually arrives. These companies will then brag repeatedly about how they haven’t raised rates yet this year, when that’s almost never actually the case.
One 2019 Consumer Reports study found that about 24% of consumer bills are comprised of bullshit fees, generating cable giants $28 billion in additional revenue annually. Some of the fees, like Centurylink’s “Internet Cost Recovery Fee” are comical gibberish. Others, such as “regulatory recovery fees,” pretend to be taxes to try and redirect the consumer’s ire toward government.
While class action lawsuits can modestly shift company behavior, it doesn’t really drive lasting change. Neither do state or federal fines, which often wind up being a small fraction of the money made off the practice, assuming they aren’t litigated down to nothing.
Class actions were flimsy enough. But starting in 2011 with a landmark AT&T Supreme Court case, America proudly decided it was legal to let companies use contract find print to force customers into binding arbitration, a lopsided pseudo-legal venture in which corporations win disputes the majority of the time. So the problem persisted.
The Biden administration made some promising noise about cracking down on such fees, but in telecom most of those efforts wound up being somewhat hollow. Like the Biden FCC creation of a new “nutrition label” rule that requires ISPs be more transparent about fees, but fall short of actually stopping your ISP or wireless carrier from ripping you off. Under Trump 2.0 I suspect those rules will never be enforced.
So the predatory corporate behavior, and the performative legal and regulatory solutions for it, will continue.
