Whenever regulators assemble to go over marketplace failures, the platitude “level playing field” eventually surfaces. When regulators eventually get around to thinking about what the results are in the internet world, particularly in the region of private info, then they will need to come to terms with how the playing field isn’t only tipped in favor of the internet giants, but is as perpendicular as that rock face in Yosemite that two Americans have eventually managed to free climb.

The mechanism for rotating the playing field is our old buddy, the stipulations arrangement, generally called the “end user license agreement” (EULA) in cyberspace. This always consists of three coats of prime legal verbiage spread over 32 pages, which essentially comes down to this: “If you would like to work with us, then you certainly will do it completely on our terms; click here to concur, otherwise go screw yourself. Oh, and incidentally, all of your own personal data shown in your interactions with us belongs to us.”

The odd thing is that formula uses regardless of whether you’re in fact attempting to buy something from the writer of the EULA or just trying to avail yourself of its “free” services.

Our great grandchildren will marvel at the reality that billions of seemingly rational people accepted this asymmetrical deal when the history of the period comes to be composed. (Our great-grandchildren might also wonder why our authorities have revealed little interest in the issue.) And future historians hunting through digital archives, will find that there were only several voices crying in the wilderness in the time.

Of these prophets, the most notable are Doc Searls, among the elder statesman of the old web who’s at the Berkman Centre at Harvard, and Jaron Lanier, a computer scientist who was among the leaders of virtual reality. In his book Who Owns the Future?, Lanier claimed that by convincing users to give away useful info about themselves in exchange for “free” services, companies like Google and Facebook have amassed colossal levels of info (and corresponding levels of riches) at almost no cost. His suggested remedy would be to make online transactions bidirectional, to make sure that people, who at the instant simply give it away can realize the economical value of private data.

Doc Searls has substantially the same argument in his novel The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Fee but proposes another type of software option – “seller relationship management”. The fundamental thought is that “many marketplace issues (including the prevalent notion that customer lock-in is a ‘best practice’) can simply be solved from the client side: by making the customer a completely empowered performer in the market place, rather than one whose power in several instances is dependent on exclusive relationships with sellers, by coerced arrangement supplied completely by those sellers”. In that sense, just as most large firms now use “customer relationship management” systems to handle their interactions with users, Searls believes that customers want systems that could manage their interactions with businesses, but on customers’ conditions.

The underlying doctrine underpinning all efforts to level the online playing field is a belief an individual’s data belongs to him or herself and that no one should have access to it except on terms which the information owner controls. The hunt is on, so, for technologies (software or hardware) that would make this both potential and be user friendly. An intriguing concept of the best way to do that surfaced by computer scientists in a paper from Cambridge University and Queen Mary University of London.