The Vision For The Decentralized Internet

And you've written, of course, many, many, many things over the years, many different topics.

In 2019, you wrote this very influential piece called Protocols Not Platforms about kind of technological approach to free speech.

I guess maybe to kind of orientate ourselves in the conversation, you know, you did write that in 2019.

It was quite a different moment to the one that we find ourselves in right now.

Things have evolved.

So what was the place from which you were writing that piece? What were you responding to in the world?

Yeah, so it actually started probably about four or five years earlier when, right, so, you know, sort of early social media, I mean, it depends on where you want to date early social media to, but sort of, you know, if you think sort of 2000, 2012, 13 timeframe, you know, there was a lot of talk about how, you know, social media was this sort of You know, wonderful things, enabling free speech around the world.

It was connecting people.

There was this period of optimism around that, and in particular, how it was going to enable more speech.

And there was this sort of conflation, I think, of a few different ideas around speech and technology.

In some ways that were good, in some ways that were problematic.

And then around 2014, 2015, people began to realize there are some limitations on that.

So there were two big controversies, and I don't even remember.

I should go back and figure out which the controversies were.

I know there was a big controversy with Twitter and a big controversy with Reddit in terms of what they were platforming and what they were allowing.

And the reality is that, you know, The question of free speech, free speech as a concept is incredibly important.

But we often conflate the idea of private entities having to host third-party speech with the concept of free speech.

And those are two different things.

And it's important to understand the difference.

Because if you want to argue that a website should allow all speech and any attempt to take down any kind of speech is anti-free speech, you quickly begin to realize the sort of limitations of that idea.

when you realize that your platform fills up with spam and scams and pure nonsense, right? Everybody at some point has a line that they have to draw, which says, on my platform, in my house, on my property, I allow this and I don't allow this.

You have certain rules.

And some of them are legally enforceable.

Child sexual abuse material, you cannot have.

Copyright infringing material is very risky to have, you know? There are certain things that are illegal, but then you have things like spam, where you realize like, oh, if I just allow spam to live on my platform, then that's going to make everybody go away.