Protocol Cooperativism
Description
A protocol cooperative is a cooperative venture to maintain a global open source or open design depository, especially in the context of providing a common infrastructure for the development of shared infrastructures for provisioning systems.
Example
Discussion
Matthew Slater:
"there is nothing about the internet that necessitates that capital-centric way of creating wealth. Platform cooperativism is the notion that the digital 'means of production', the platform, should be owned by, governed by and should enrich the participating value creators. As an approach and as a tactic, it is a straight extension of rudimentary 19th Century cooperativism into the digital age and cyberspace. In which case we should anticipate it working as it always has on the sidelines but never to impact the wider economy.
I believe another strategy shows promise. Let us not focus on property and ownership and control, but on relationships and protocols and collaboration. There are plenty of precedents to work with, but I haven't seen this thinking applied in the platform cooperativism space.
By protocol I mean a language, convention, or standard. Use of such things cannot be restricted, prevented or monetised any more than use of a word, gesture, or social code. The Internet is essentially a set of protocols such as TCP/UDP, http, HTML, which led to a highly egalitarian participative infrastructure. That need not have been so: in a parallel universe, Microsoft R&D invented the web and now every page is a visual-basic-enhanced word document; MS Office is the only tool for authoring web-pages, and it costs $5000 for a licence and still looks wrong on Firefox!
Fortunately that particular dystopia was avoided because we had those open protocols. I think that is why the early Web inspired a great deal of optimism about the levelling of the socio-economic playing field - recall John Perry Barlow:
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us... We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. A cyberspace Independence Declaration The basic internet remains free as designed: we still pay nothing for example for sending an email or retrieving a web page but something has gone wrong. The Internet continued to grow, as with all technologies, as new layers were built; the internal logic of each layer is entirely independent of the others just as the stable atomic model of protons, neutrons and electrons owes nothing to the fuzzy quantum reality on which it is based. Gradually the capitalist interests worked out how to replicate their own logic and structures in cyberspace. On top of the open protocols they built pay walls, monetised services and enclosed spaces. The rules are different at every level. In 2017 it seems normal that platforms large and small, own data and control economic territory for the benefit of private investors. The biggest platforms have the most users and the most money and the most political power and that is why I find it hard to imagine any platform like minds.com competing head-to-head with Facebook, and winning. I want to expand upon this argument:
A platform cooperative or a platform company model is not one that takes full advantage of the potential to have a truly distributed network. They still have a central platform operator at their core, providing coordination, quality assurance and, most essentially, trust. However, it is possible to go beyond platforms to protocols - to commonly agreed ways of operating. Thus anyone who agrees to the rules can become a part of the network.
Ride-sharing is the poster child of the sharing economy, the pressure point chosen by platform cooperatives, and the current fiefdom of Uber. It could be considered a natural monopoly, which is to say it involves infrastructure which need not be duplicated - users don't want to have multiple identities, apps, user interfaces, price structures etc. So Uber's near monopoly, won as a direct result of having unimaginable access to money, is an invaluable commercial advantage in itself because without serious competition it can squeeze the market for all it is worth. But be careful what you wish for; should Uber fall from grace, the market would probably splinter into many incompatible pieces, which benefits neither the people with cars nor those who need rides.
A platform cooperative ride-sharing service sounds like an attempt to form a cooperative and compete with Uber by recycling profits and remunerating workers better. Its not a very convincing business plan if only because Uber has resources to undercut its competition until they choke and allegedly acts illegally to sabotage its enemies.
But a protocol for ride-sharing changes the game completely. Anyone could sign up to the network and announce their intention to travel or willingness to chauffeur. A simple algorithm would connect them and at journey's end they might remunerate each other in cash, Bitcoin, home-brewed cider or anything; the line between giving a friend a favour and earning a crust would be very grey. There would be no middle men collecting rent or dictating how drivers should behave as representatives of the company. The protocol might be extended to support long distance travel, hitch-hiking, pick-up points, packages or even cargo. The open protocol creates a free market - not in the neoliberal sense of Wall Street being able to flush out the economy of any country it likes with imaginary dollars, but in the sense that suppliers and customers can meet with the minimal of mediation and restrictions. This might not be optimal for collecting taxes, but is optimal for granting everyone access to the economy, and probably much more efficient in terms of using our existing transport infrastructure.
So where is the 'cooperative' in 'protocol cooperatives'? In my view such protocols are are fundamentally cooperative, but there is room for any kind of institutional structures on the next layer. Institutions (like co-ops) are not needed to crunch algorithms and own infrastructure that should be public, but to manage trust and social relations. Transport service providers could aggregate to offer services that individuals could not. For example a group might form to co-own a coach, helicopter, or fleet of electric cars. A co-op might provide a 24/7 private ambulance service, or a house removal service complete with furniture-carriers.
Likely such a protocol widely deployed would render our transport ecosystem unrecognisable. It might obviate most full time driver jobs in favour of hitch-hiking 2.0 approach. The free market would level out the full time driving jobs and the unemployment of drivers and costs and revenues, leading presumably to a more equal society (at least until driver-less cars took over!)
The blockchains are already making this happen because blockchains are basically protocols which allow open participation." (http://matslats.net/protocol-cooperativism-platform-cooperativism)
Protocols vs Platforms
Bob Haugen:
The differences in my mind between protocol, framework, and platform include:
- a protocol usually has a specification, and if you can follow the specification, you can use the protocol. So the Web stack was a protocol. Many independently-developed Web servers and clients and pages use the protocol.
- a protocol usually has some software that runs it, but if it is really a protocol, many independent software components can run and interact with each other using the protocol.
- a framework is usually a set of software components that people can use to develop applications.
- so for example, with Holochain, we are creating a framework that will run top of Holochain the protocol, that we and others can use to develop economic network apps.
- we and others are developing similar frameworks for the ActivityPub and SSB protocols.
- I see some differences of opinion on platforms, but to me, and platform is an all-embracing, usually centralized, system, that will usually be developed on a framework, using a protocol, but you are usually stuck using the platform’s implementations of the framework and the protocol.
So in terms of degrees of freedom for independent development:
- a protocol has the most
- a framework has less
- a platform has the least (of those three)."
(Loomio, December 2018)
Instituting Protocol Cooperatives at the Nation-State Level: the proposal for the British Digital Cooperative
"Wherever possible, a reforming state will want to reduce monopoly rents and compulsory charges in the economy. Our agenda for the digital sector would therefore include a suite of publicly owned and democratically managed software resources. At the outset this would include enterprise and operating systems based on existing free software resources - publicly funded and maintained versions of Linux, Open Office, and so on. Small businesses and the self-employed will immediately enjoy lower overheads and public sector organisations will benefit from enhanced system security and reduced operating costs.The state’s ability to establish standards across its own institutions means that it has enormous power to stabilise and promote a low-cost system architecture.31 A publicly funded development platform could allow independent operators to add to the share of free resources and provide a structure of payments that rewarded valuable innovations without resorting to the market mechanism.32
There are many other areas where the public sector can strip out rents." (https://thenextsystem.org/bdc)