Consider adding a new principle about providing undiscriminating economic opportunity

[tobie]

The web offers incredible economic opportunities, and while a number of the ethical web principles acknowledge the value of empowering individuals or providing equal opportunity, the economic opportunities enabled by the web are barely mentioned in EWP.

I'd be happy to help suggest text once we have agreement that (a) this is worth pursuing and (b) on the direction such a principle would take.

[OR13]

When you say "undiscriminating economic opportunity", what do you mean?

The constant competition and variety of choices that come from having multiple interoperable implementations means the web ecosystem is constantly improving.

• https://w3ctag.github.io/ethical-web-principles/#multi

vs....

Mozilla is basically forced to do whatever Google wants at this point. Firefox doesn't have the marketshare to influence standards, and if it doesn't maintain feature compatibility with Chrome, websites will drop Firefox support, and Firefox will loose even more marketshare and have even less influence. Mozilla quite clearly didn't want to implement EME, for example, but they couldn't afford for Firefox to not work with Netflix! Apple has more freedom than Mozilla precisely because Safari users can't just switch to another browser. And for as much as I find that abhorrent and anti-competitive... if Apple is going to retain so much power anyway, I'm at least happy they're using it to prevent Google's total dominance. ... Google is using a similar strategy to what Microsoft used in the late 90s. The difference is that MS implemented new tags and features in IE without any standard. Google is taking care of manipulating the standard, and then singlehandedly implementing these new features in the standard even if nobody else cares about it. Then it manipulates their services to require those features, so Chrome is the only option.

This is behavior typical of large corporations and monopolies, because they have the resources to throw at the creation of more and more features, at the expense of smaller competitors.

• https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27985783

This rather painful HN thread addresses this topic head on... I am not sure I can extract any positive principles from it, but I will try...

I am hearing that it's a problem that "not everyone has the time to implement a new standard"... if the standard is implemented by only 1 of the top 3 browsers, that can lead to "discriminating economic opportunities"...

There is also the question of "is every standard at W3C meant to be implemented by a browser vendor or all browser vendors"?

Browser vendor economic opportunity is not uniformly distributed across the web or mobile vs desktop, etc...

I'm not seeing a web principle here other than perhaps "Concentrated markets are bad and standards SHOULD NOT be used to make market concentration problems worse"...

Market concentration measures the extent to which market shares are concentrated between a small number of firms. It is often taken as a proxy for the intensity of competition. Indeed, in recent years changes in concentration have increasingly been used to argue that the intensity of competition is falling, that the growth of large firms with high market shares is driving up profits, damaging innovation and productivity, and increasing inequality. Some have argued that the competition rules need to be rewritten and a crackdown by overly antitrust agencies is required.

• https://www.oecd.org/competition/market-concentration.htm

I would be in favor of some language that was supportive of competitive, un-concentrated markets, and opposed to dark patterns around vendor lock, or anticompetitive manipulations of a standards process, etc.

I realize this topic is potentially controversial, but imo it is a principle worth refining, I see it as directly applying to the current introduction of EWP:

The web should empower an equitable, informed and interconnected society. It has been, and should continue to be designed to enable communication and knowledge-sharing for everyone. In the 30 years since development of the web began, it has become clear that the web platform can often be used in ways that subvert that mission. Furthermore, web technologies can be used to cause harm, which is not in keeping with the spirit of this social mission. The web should be a platform that helps people and provides a net positive social benefit. As we continue to evolve the web platform, we must therefore consider the ethical implications of our work. The web must be for good.

IMO, It's not enough to say "The web must be for good."... there should be ethical web principles that support a competitive economic model that protects the web from accidentally or intentionally becoming evil.

[masinter]

Why is there a w3c? Why not just work on specs in github repos?

W3C provides a context and staff to facilitate standards-making.

W3C provides policies and perspectives to help people who want to contribute to the common good to do so.

The rules about consensus and reviews and Members and Invited Experts and Formal Objection were meant to help insure there weren’t natural global monopolies merely because of economies of scale.

It’s part of the context of this document. Perhaps a mention in the introduction.

[tobie]

I think those are great points, @masinter, worthy of a separate issue.

[torgo]

Just discussing this morning. We're considering an edit to one of the existing principles (Individuals' control and power) to capture this. And and as well we thought that maybe this more belongs in the process CG? @wseltzer @hober any thoughts?