My AOL Instant Messenger username was CrAzYpErSon24635 (cringy, I know). At the time, I thought it was the best way to convey my personality to my friends online. AIM was my first introduction to tech-based social interaction. I became addicted to the ways in which the platform gamified social interaction — online, you could be bolder, louder, and overall, just cooler than you felt in real life. But mostly, I was able to create a new community with my friends at school — a distinct community running parallel to real life.
Social media is the means by which people exchange ideas and strengthen interpersonal connection beyond geographical boundaries. This is particularly true for Black Americans. Approximately 77% of Black adults use social media, and Black adults are more likely than white adults to use Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), YouTube, WhatsApp, and TikTok. Specifically, through spaces like #BlackTwitter, Black people are able to not only engage in a shared cultural experience, but also exchange critical information on social justice and activism. The use of social media is incredibly democratizing — through an open and accessible internet, disenfranchised and marginalized groups can tell their own stories, in their own voices.
Companies are extremely aware of how the digital world has evolved to host countless virtual communities. The Metaverse was created to make this concept more tangible. Mark Zuckerberg even attempted to bring the concept into the mainstream by entering the metaverse market race by rebranding Facebook as Meta. Zuckerberg and others have attempted to establish a virtual arena of “interconnected digital spaces that lets you do things you can’t do in the physical world… [creating] the feeling that you’re right there with another person, no matter where you happen to be in the world.” While the Metaverse hasn’t turned out quite like Zuckerberg hoped yet, online communities in general have increased exponentially. However, the online platforms hosting these communities remain confined to a select few.
But the lack of diversity in the online platform market deprives consumers of the ability to choose. Consumers have no alternative but to weather the storm of mishaps like server crashes, data breaches, and inconsistent, poor, or harmful content moderation. In an ideal world, consumers would simply be able to migrate to a platform that better suits their needs. Consider the earlier example of #BlackTwitter — after X.com, formerly known as Twitter, was acquired by Elon Musk, Black American users experienced a decline in quality that made the platform inhospitable. The obvious solution here would be to migrate to a rival platform that offers similar services. But, while similar competitors to X.com exist, users aren’t able to migrate their data and followers to another platform or communicate with old friends from one platform to the next, and therefore are not incentivized to leave. X.com users are also not allowed to link to other websites on the platform, which would inform those in their network of their departure. As a result, consumers are held captive. It begs the question — if a dominant platform, particularly one that allows Black Americans to enhance their internal network, becomes inhospitable, what are the long-term negative impacts? In the long run, dominant platforms may undermine and subsequently dissipate channels of communication for not just the Black American community, but also other communities of color that likewise use digital platforms to build a strong network.
These potential negative impacts are why digital platform competition is so important. With healthy market competition, platforms alter their features and policies in response to competitive pressure, both from rivals and consumers that have the option to take their business elsewhere. Data portability can aid in creating such an environment – disparate platforms should ensure that they can communicate with each other to transfer user data, making it so users can transfer their data to another platform without difficulty. Still studies have shown that even data portability does not promote adequate competition for consumers, but that true interoperability is needed to free consumers from the dominance of the most powerful platforms. Interoperability allows for true communication by consumers between platforms, and is an underlying value of the world wide web as its creator Tim Berners Lee intended before Google and Meta existed. With interoperability and data portability, dominant platforms are forced to compete with rivals on quality and respond directly to consumer needs. Users won’t need to put up with a platform’s content moderation decisions that make it difficult to speak candidly, or policies that make it difficult to sell their products at a profitable price — they will have the ability to move their data and networks from one competitor to another.
Consumers deserve healthy platform competition, and data portability and interoperability can help achieve that. People should be able to stay connected to one another regardless of the platform they use. The decentralized web movement (in which Tim Berners Lee is also a leader) is an example of tech leaders who believe in competition by promoting protocols that enable interoperability between the platforms built on top of that protocol. This is what the world wide web was at its core, and is what innovators like Holochain and Nostr are currently building: a technological course correction for web 2.0 to web 3.0. Imagine how wonderful it would be to be a former #BlackTwitter user who moved to a platform with greater moderation of hate speech and election disinformation, but still able to message or communicate with your friends who never left X.com where moderation has slowed to a crawl? This is just one possible future that the decentralized web community is making possible.
But as we have learned from dominant communications tools of the past, waiting for market corrections from small competitors to the dominant platforms is often not sufficient to create the competition (and resulting innovation) that consumers need. Sector-specific legislation and robust antitrust enforcement of digital platform markets can help that happen. Specifically, Congress needs to mandate platform interoperability with bills like the ‘‘Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching Act (ACCESS),” which makes it easier for social media users to switch platforms, move their data, and continue to communicate with friends. Congress must also pass legislation that fosters healthy market competition, such as the “American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA),” which prohibits large online platforms from discriminating against rivals and prevents self-preferencing. Lastly, Congress should create a sector-specific regulator for digital platforms, specifically one that is appropriately equipped to research and enforce against the consumer harms that people of all backgrounds experience due to digital platform consolidation. With these tools, all consumers will be able to benefit from an open internet filled with market options that suit their individual needs.