Josh BraunI've seen plenty of discussions in recent days over the network structure of Mastodon and whether it can remain decentralized as large commercial players begin taking an interest in the fediverse. I am neither an engineer nor an economist, but I do research the way media and information get distributed and I have some thoughts on this. A thread…
Matthew Hindman, in his book "The Internet Trap" <http://assets.press.princeton.edu/chapters/s13236.pdf>, notes that most research on the internet has focused on its supposedly decentralized nature, leaving us with little language to really grapple with the concentrated, oligopolistic state of today's online economy, where the vast majority of attention and revenue accrue to a tiny number of companies. 1/
This is a really nice observation. While it's true that the research on concentration in new media is laggy, I'd suggest it's useful here to look to the political economy and material realities of previous communication systems. In particular, there are a number of important dynamics that have historically tended to shape the organization of telecommunication networks that have interesting implications for Mastodon. 2/
To start with, consider the physical infrastructure of older point-to-point communication networks like the telegraph and telephone. Economies of scale for these networks work in an entirely different fashion than in industries, like retail or manufacturing, that come most readily to mind when considering how markets work. 3/
To wit, if you run a traditional business where you make a product—ice cream, say—economies of scale work in your favor. As you produce more ice cream, you can drive down the production cost per unit by negotiating better rates with your suppliers, who'll charge you less for milk and sugar if they know you're going to buy in bulk. 4/
If you run a telephone network, on the other hand, your costs go up faster as you sign up new subscribers. That's because the infrastructure necessary to connect all these people scales quadratically. To see what I mean, take a look at these stills from "The Far Sound," and old film about the Bell system: 5/
Edit: Fixed wrong word choice. Thanks to those who noticed.
That chart may look familiar, because it's largely identical to the one people commonly use to describe "Metcalfe's Law" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe%27s_law). The difference is Metcalfe's Law is about the social benefits of a communication's network—how it's utility to end users increases as it scales. What I'm saying here—and what network operators have long realized—is that the *costs* of operating the network infrastructure also scale quadratically as it grows. 6/
(Word fixed.)
The Mastodon network doesn't rely on laying cable (that's someone else's scaling-infrastructure problem), but all the point-to-point connections between users in the network do create analogous scaling issues in terms of data storage, which piles up as those links are established—each connection a conduit for a bunch of new posts that have to be stored somewhere. 7/
You see this every time a novice admin posts with exclamation points about how quickly their new instance's hard drive is filling. And they're providing the service for free, so they're not recouping *any* costs apart from possible crowdfunding donations. 8/
Another issue has to do with rights of way. In the physical world, the government is the one with the power to allow you to trench up streets for your cabling or use a particular radio frequency, so they have lots of leverage over you. You can't move your Chicago telephone exchange to Philly, either, so historically governments driven hard bargains (not these days for reasons I'll touch on). Unsurprisingly, then, graft and logrolling have long been rampant in the telecom business. 9/
There's no government to negotiate with in the Mastodon network, of course. Servers connect with one another more or less by default to deliver messages. But it's also quite simple for one server to silence or defederate with another over offenses, heinous behavior, or even simple policy differences. That means some level of negotiation is often happening between admins to get servers un-suspended. 10/
The largest servers may take on the clout of city councils if smaller ones want access to their users, giving them the power to set the terms for rights of way. That said, the opposite dynamic seems also to be true on some sites, with admins automatically refusing to federate with instances over a certain size on account of the attendant moderation difficulties. 11/
Richard John <https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674088139> highlights how the growth costs of networks have often led to great incumbency advantages. With the telegraph system, for example, lots of startups died after creating small regional networks because they didn't understand the unique economies of scale going in. That enabled the giant monopoly of the day, Western Union, to grow even more mammoth in size by buying out these smaller networks and incorporating them into its huge one. 12/
Network Nation — Richard R. John
Network Nation places the history of telecommunications within the broader context of American politics, business, and discourse. This engrossing and provocative book persuades us of the critical role of political economy in the development of new technologies and their implementation.
Early on, well-intentioned regulators who aimed at breaking up big monopolies like Western Union didn't understand the weird economies of scale they were dealing with either. They actually created incentive programs that led to the creation of many of the ill-fated startups that Western Union later gobbled up to expand its network. After that, and some similar experiences with regulating the telephone network, they got trigger shy and began to treat telecom companies as natural monopolies. 13/
Similarly, it remains to be seen whether the flood of new instances starting right now on Mastodon will scale up smoothly, with users kicking in the necessary funding, or whether they'll be overrun by costs their creators didn't anticipate, leaving domains and/or user bases to be subsumed by (commercial?) instances with deeper pockets. 14/
Anyhow, all of this is to not to say that point-to-point information networks necessarily end up as monopolies, but that there are definitely economic forces that push in that direction that have to be considered in designing networks, crafting regulations, and — when commerce comes into play — structuring markets. Even email, everyone's favorite example of decentralization, is now facilitated by a small cartel of rich commercial providers. 15/
The problem, of course — the one everyone knows — is that once providers become big enough, they turn the tables on regulators and users. The Chicago city council may once have had the telephone exchange by the throat, but now massive telecomm and tech companies are dominant forces in federal government and strangle their users through lock-in, as @pluralistic details brilliantly. <https://web.archive.org/web/20210622050005/https://thereboot.com/unfair-use-anti-interoperability-and-our-dwindling-digital-freedom/> 16/
The future may well be a bunch of Mastodon instances managed by a small number of hosting providers. Or a commercial instance with so much of the user base that the majority of instances treat its federation requirements as de facto policy. The downsides of concentrated, commercial social media are well known. @ubiquity75's work provides a master class here. <https://www.behindthescreen-book.com/> 17/
If folks want to prevent these outcomes, for example to preserve a system where everyone logs on through small communities where they know the admin and moderators personally, the governing principles need to be put in place now. The technology won't do it by itself, and in fact it may create conditions that favor the opposite outcome. /fin
Nick Couldry@josh very important and thoughtful intervention thanks!