What's New at RightsCon? And How to Free Our Feeds

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

This episode features two segments. First, we hear from Nikki Gladstone, director of Rightscon, the annual conference organized by Access Now on issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. And in the second, you’ll hear from Robin Berjon and Sean McDonald, two of the folks behind Free Our Feeds, a new effort to raise a public interest foundation that will work to support making Bluesky’s underlying tech (the AT Protocol) resistant to billionaire capture.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Justin Hendrix:

Good morning. I'm Justin Hendrix, editor of Tech Policy Press, a non-profit media venture intended to provoke new ideas, debate and discussion at the intersection of technology and democracy. We've got two segments today, both with people who are working to make technology work more in the public interest. In the first, you'll hear from Nikki Gladstone, director of RightsCon, the annual conference on issues at the intersection of human rights and technology. And in the second, you'll hear from two of the folks behind Free Our Feeds, a new effort to raise a public interest foundation to support making Bluesky's underlying tech, the AT Protocol, resistant to billionaire capture. First up, let's talk about RightsCon.

Nikki Gladstone:

My name is Nikki Gladstone. I'm the RightsCon director with Access Now.

Justin Hendrix:

Nikki, I'm glad to have you here today. We're going to talk a little bit about what to expect at RightsCon this year. Some tech policy press listeners are headed to Taipei, I'm sure. Others perhaps are going to join online February 24th through 27th. What can folks expect when they arrive in Taipei?

Nikki Gladstone:

We've evolved over the years, and every iteration of RightsCon looks different because we host it in different locations. And so I think folks can expect for this RightsCon to really center perspectives from East Asia, our first conference in East Asia, as well as the wider Asia-Pacific region. So I think we'll see a lot of new stakeholders, specifically private sector from Asia, civil society from the region, and government from the region, which will be a really great opportunity, especially because our last in-person events have been so far from the region. And I think they can also expect to see some of the staples of RightsCon that they're used to if they've attended in the past, our decentralized program of about 550 sessions and around 3000 people from probably over 150 countries who will be arriving there with them.

Justin Hendrix:

I wanted to ask you a little bit about that decentralized program. I'm sure, from your perspective, there are trends, there are patterns, there are probably some things to learn just in terms of what people submit, what people want to talk about, what the community cares about. What did you see this year when it comes to high-level patterns with regard to the submissions for panels and discussions?

Nikki Gladstone:

Yeah, we always think of the RightsCon program, and specifically the call for proposals process, as holding up a mirror to what this network of people is thinking about when it comes to technology and human rights. And that was no different, this year. We received about 1,800 proposals from more than 1300 organizations and over 125 countries. So it's a really diverse representation of what are the most pressing issues that all stakeholder groups are facing right now. And the call for proposals is divided into 18 program categories. So we really try to determine the trends based on what proposals come in.

This year, we've seen a lot around election and information integrity, which isn't surprising given we're following the biggest global election year in recorded history. As is consistent with past years, a really growing coverage of artificial intelligence. I think advancing and emerging technologies like generative AI, space data and technology, these are all topics that a couple of years ago may have been a much smaller representation of the program, but it's really everywhere you turn in the program now. There's some mention of artificial intelligence.

And then, I think, again, as a reflection of the world we're living in, we're seeing a lot of coverage, a lot of proposals on the use of technologies and conflict and humanitarian settings. So internet shutdowns in Gaza, Myanmar, Kashmir, Sudan, the weaponization of AI for state and non-state, propaganda, the role of social media platforms in facilitating cyber surveillance, digital oppression, wartime censorship. So in many ways, what we saw come through the call for proposals really reflects a lot of the headlines around the world in terms of some of the major challenges we're facing.

Justin Hendrix:

So a lot of these themes folks will recognize from prior RightsCon, of course, focused on things like encryption, internet shutdowns, and how to disrupt online hate and violence, but I was interested you also have a track on futures, fiction, and creativity this year. It seems like that was also a strong desire among the community to represent some different ways of thinking about these things.

Nikki Gladstone:

Yeah, that's a program category I personally really love. It's one that we added a couple of years ago, and it's been really cool to see different perspectives from authors and artists and their approach to some of the issues that we work on. One of the sessions I'm actually most excited about is a workshop that Fight for the Future is running based on a writing competition we did with them in the lead-up to RightsCon. So the winner of that writing competition is going to join RightsCon and there'll be a workshop on how we can better connect fiction to tech justice.

And so I think what we've seen over the past couple of years is that it's not just about the traditional stakeholder groups like companies and governments and civil society, they're important, but there's space for perspectives from musicians, artists, authors, and so really trying to understand and recognize the challenges that exist in our world right now but also bring some creativity into reimagining what a future could look like.

Justin Hendrix:

Any highlights on the main stage?

Nikki Gladstone:

Yeah. I mean, the unique thing about the RightsCon program is that we host over 500 sessions across the four days of RightsCon, and so nearly half of the participants that we bring are speakers and experts in their own right. I think if I were to name some people who represent the diversity of perspectives that we'll see at RightsCon, we have the executive director of Human Rights Watch joining us, we have the president of Signal and the head of global Content delivery policy for Netflix just to name a few different folks. We're also hosting our annual cyber ambassadors meetings, so we'll see government representatives from a number of different countries with folks who are really focused on these issues. But yeah, that's just four examples of what will be thousands of speakers that will be joining us.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, can you tell us about the growth of the RightsCon community? I know things have grown quite a lot in the last few years. There was that brief caesura around, but seems like it continues to just grow.

Nikki Gladstone:

Yeah, I think that's a great question and is really reflective of how much technology is impacting our world. We started in 2011 as the Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference, and that was a couple of hundred people who were really focused on core digital rights issues trying to bring the human rights agenda to the tech sector. In the last couple of years, and I think there was a real clear turning point in 2017, but the program began to expand to cover all human rights issues. And right now, everything is on the table when it comes to RightsCon, whether it's climate change or gender justice issues or indigenous rights, there's really no shortage of topics that are on the program and I think our community has expanded to reflect that as well.

We've seen a growth in participation over the years. I think we doubled from 2017 to 2019, and then, of course, with the onset of COVID-19 really expanded reach and access in an online era of RightsCon. And last year, or in 2023, we saw about 3000 people in person and nearly 6,000 online. And I think we're expecting somewhat similar numbers for Taipei. I think we've really seen growth in terms of the types of communities that are coming to RightsCon. I think it's no longer just the tech companies or just the human rights organizations that are focused on digital rights, but really an expansive network of everyone who is working on human rights and technology. And I would say, for a lot of reasons, that's why there's a version of RightsCon that works for everyone and there's not a singular experience that people have when they come to the event. It's really a build your own experience based on the work that you do and the interests that you have.

Justin Hendrix:

Well, I also plan to be at RightsCon this year. I'm looking forward to visiting Taipei again. This will be my third time in Taipei. Nikki, I assume you've had a chance to visit and the run-up to this program.

Nikki Gladstone:

Yeah, maybe four or five times in the past year. So really looking forward for our community to experience Taipei. There's such a rich civil society community there, and the government has a really interesting whole of government approach to human rights, and so I think there's a lot for the community to learn from folks from Taiwan who will be attending RightsCon

Justin Hendrix:

Always ranked as one of the world's most vibrant democracies, and I have to say, one of the best places to eat on the planet as well. So I'm looking forward to that. Nikki, I hope I see you somewhere. Maybe we'll stuff our face with dumplings.

Nikki Gladstone:

Yeah, absolutely.

Justin Hendrix:

Thanks so much.

Nikki Gladstone:

No problem. Thanks for having me.

Justin Hendrix:

I hope to see some of you in Taipei.

Next up, we're going to learn more about Free Our Feeds, a new effort to raise a public interest foundation to support making Bluesky's underlying tech, the AT Protocol, resistant to billionaire capture.

Robin Berjon:

My name is Robin Berjon. I am deputy director of the IPFS Foundation, and more generally, an independent technology working on problems of governance.

Sean McDonald:

My name is Sean McDonald. I'm a partner at Digital Public.

Justin Hendrix:

Excited to speak to the two of you today. You are signatories to an open letter under the question, will you help us to free social media from billionaire control? You talk about the situation where we've got ourselves in with Twitter. You call yourselves former Twitter users who cherish the platform and the communities we've built there. You see something new and different in Bluesky and AT Protocol that underlies it, and are determined to keep it free from billionaire control. What is Free Our Feeds? What's going on here?

Robin Berjon:

I think you've summarized it pretty well. It essentially is a group of people who are currently raising funds in order to support a project that will ensure that the AT Protocol that underlies Bluesky stays open and operates in the public interest. There's a number of signatories of the letter. I mean, I know that Cory Doctorow signed it, for instance, Shoshana Zuboff and a number of other people, Mark Ruffalo, quite famously as well. In terms of the custodians, there's also a group of people who are basically ensuring that the initial project stays on track and achieves its initial objectives. And so that's a group of a diversity of people such as Nabiha Syed, Eli Pariser, Mallory Nodal, essentially a small group of people from diverse horizons trying to make sure that at least during this initial stage, the project really focuses on its goals and succeeds in deploying this foundation and the initial stages of the infrastructure.

Sean McDonald:

I think it's worth adding that in the first three days, we've had over a thousand donors. So there are the custodians, there are the people who signed the letter, there's an operating group that's trying to help keep the wheels turning, but really, this is a community effort that is both designed to draw on a moment of opportunity in the technological zeitgeist and to share those resources back out in support of a wide range of communities that are also already doing really important and powerful work in creating open infrastructure for social networking. And so I think it's worth just really pulling on the breadth of effort. I mean, as Robin was saying, there are a wide range of people from an even wider range of backgrounds coming to this and putting what they can into it. And sometimes that's attention and sometimes that's technical expertise and sometimes that's money and sometimes that's just time. And we've been really lucky to have such a broad base of support to this point.

Justin Hendrix:

Perhaps fortuitous timing in your announcement, you note with Zuckerberg going the full Musk last week, but also, we heard a little bit of the same types of concerns out of Joe Biden and his farewell speech. He was talking about the problem of what he called the tech industrial complex, the problem of oligarchy in the United States, the problem of tech billionaires with too much control. He related that to problems of artificial intelligence but also social media. I think a lot of folks who are listening to the Tech Policy Press podcast are going to be naturally inclined to also want to shake up the status quo as you put it.

I do want to step back just for a moment and ask about Bluesky's underlying technology about AT Protocol. For anybody who's not familiar with what this thing is, what's under the hood, why should we care about AT Protocol?

Robin Berjon:

I mean, in an ideal world, you wouldn't have to care about it because it would just operate the way every other piece of infrastructure operates. And so you might have to look into it once in a while, but generally go about your business and ignore it. I think it was Deb Chopra who said quite adequately that if you consider everything that you pay no attention to, that already gives you a good idea of what infrastructure is. And I think that's where we would ultimately like to get to. However, the problem is, given where we are today, most digital infrastructure, almost all digital infrastructure is in billionaire or monopoly hands, and therefore we have to worry about it because it is not being governed in our interest.

And so to return to the AT Protocol, it is basically the underlying that makes Bluesky possible, but what's interesting about it, I mean, at least one of the things that's interesting about it is that it enables other people to build other social apps and other social systems on top of the same protocol, reusing the same infrastructure, reusing the same basic primitives and the same bricks essentially. And so the thing is this is a nice open system that is potentially transformative for the full social media space and full social media infrastructure, but so long as there's only Bluesky in that space, it is hard to guarantee that it will remain open. And so we're basically working to ensure that this underlying protocol level, this fundamental infrastructure, essentially the roads of social media stay open for all.

Sean McDonald:

I think it's worth saying that the Bluesky team is on board with this in the sense that the AT Protocol is something that they actively want other people to build on, and the Bluesky team has been very public about acknowledging the fact that their own commercial pressures are likely to become a distorting influence on whatever comes down the line. I think that what's so exciting about this moment of opportunity is that there is a huge community of people who are interested in participating in Bluesky and building on it and working on it. And what we want to make sure of is that the commercialization of it or that efforts to invest in its innovation or efforts to invest in its sustainability and scaling don't throw the baby out with a bathwater, that we don't lose the infrastructure because one company makes a certain series of choices.

As Robin was saying earlier, and I think you said it as well, one of the main problems here is just centralization of decision-making. And the more that we can build opportunities for high-value, high-impact participation in enabling people to make decisions that shape their experience, the more effective I think we'll feel like we have been. We are operating very much in line with the animating intention of the Bluesky team and the people behind the AT Protocol and the broader community who are looking at how to build more robustness and resilience into this ecosystem.

Justin Hendrix:

When I think about some of the other things on the internet that we admire public interest options, there's Signal of course, which has the Signal Foundation, there's the Wikimedia Foundation, which helps maintain Wikipedia. Other analogs to what you're doing or other things that you've learned about that seem to present alternatives to the commercially driven options that are out there.

Sean McDonald:

I don't think there's any argument that having an independently governed and participatory endowment is preferable to having a bank of VCs when it comes to thinking about creating public interest infrastructure. I think that Wikimedia and Signal, by developing independent endowments, have absolutely blazed a trail to think about what it means to build a revenue and business infrastructure that can credibly provide a foundation for the kind of effort that we're trying to mobilize here. I don't think endowment or any single entity is an end-all or be-all solution, and I think that there are a lot of different models to supporting this kind of work that have different contextual value and values and that are worth supporting. I think that part of the structure of this approach has been building a technical and financial and governance infrastructure that's directly and intentionally interested in investing in that diversity and exploring which types of products, which types of governance models, which types of revenue models result in the kind of infrastructure that we want to see, that the public wants to see that drives a public interest in these spaces.

Robin Berjon:

Absolutely agree with what Sean said, but I would add to that if you consider the infrastructure as a stack, you really need to look to nail three things in order for it to work for people. You need the tech to be right, you need the governance to be right and you need the funding to be right. And I think one thing that lies behind your question is that there are many systems that have succeeded in doing that. Yes, we can talk about signal, we can talk about Wikimedia as two success stories, and even then, Signal requires $50 million a year to operate. Raising that money year after year as a non-profit is extremely difficult, very hard work. It's always terrifying that it might not be sustainable enough. And Wikimedia has been doing well. They have a significant endowment now, but if they come in the significant threat as the risk seems to be arising in the US nowadays, it's not certain that that will be enough. And so I think we need to be realistic about this and to also try to go beyond what has been done before and figure out models of sustainability that have yet to emerge.

I think if we go back over the past 20 years, one of the interesting models that sadly went off the rails afterwards, but one of the interesting models was what Firefox did where they actually found a very sustainable source of income by selling access to selling the default slot for the search engine. It was a brilliant idea when they had it. The problem is they stopped there and they didn't look for further more diversified sources of income. And also, it created an entire system where basically Google can pay to be a monopoly by buying off every browser. So it had nasty side effects, but they had the right-thinking in the beginning of trying to look for sustainable model. And I think we need to be exploring options, some of which people will not, like potentially trying to build a public interest advertising network in order to support these kinds of projects with privacy, preserving ethically sourced, if you will, advertising. But we need to be realistic about trying to look for funding beyond what has been done before.

Sean McDonald:

How we publicly fund support and govern sustainably, any shared resource is an open and evolving and dynamic space. And that's true in technology and that's true in the analog. Exactly as Robin is saying, one of the best solutions or models that exists is when the revenue of a product's operation sustains it. So not just large boluses of capital, but when the operation of the product generates revenue that sustains it. And so I think there are a lot of models where that has been successful, but how we build governance into that is another set of questions.

From my perspective, I think for example, WhatsApp, prior to the Facebook acquisition, also had a really phenomenal model where they had their revenue significantly exceeded their operating costs and they were running a, relatively speaking, a comfortably managed service or with a pretty solid profit and they didn't necessarily have the expectations of venture returns, which enabled them to hold and build a much more linear and very substantial amount of year-on-year revenue. Now, I don't think that's the exact model for everything that we're talking about, but it is a demonstration or an illustration of a product whose business operations supported its ongoing maintenance. And I think that that is, in many ways, what Free Our Feeds I think is raising resources to support or finding other ways to build that clear, non-exploitive business model that people can support and that creates access to the services that we all care about without necessarily having to engage on a day-to-day basis with thinking about their business model.

Robin Berjon:

I think that that's absolutely right. There are multiple models that we can be exploring to make things sustainable. One thing that's worth considering that we keep returning to this issue that there's not enough money. There's a lot of money in tech. And if you look at how existing privatized digital infrastructure operates, they do something very simple. They don't call it that, but they do something very simple. It's called taxation. When you use the App Store, you pay a 30% tax on any income you make in there. When you run on advertising, you pay 50, 80% tax on anything that happens there. And I could keep going, right? This privatized infrastructure levies essentially a private taxation system. Most of those tax dollars essentially don't go back into supporting better infrastructure. They go into all kinds of other things.

I mean, one great example is how, again, to return to how browsers are funded by search, Apple gets a 20 billion payout from Google every year, and that's essentially a taxation that browsers levy on search, but those $20 billion don't go into making the web better. A small part of that goes into Safari and WebKit. Most of it goes to other parts of Apple and up taking it from the web and distributed completely elsewhere. But this means that if we succeed in controlling in a more democratic way, digital infrastructure, we have the means to also levy some degree of funding in order to support the operations of the infrastructure. And it won't be 30%, 80% as in the current ad networks. It'll be something much more reasonable, but that will serve to fund public infrastructure.

So there are ways. We just need to establish that infrastructure first.

Justin Hendrix:

It strikes me that there are a lot of folks who would stand a gain from paying less tax to the big tech firms, not just advertisers as you've already mentioned, but also lots of creators, lots of independent media organizations, lots of other types of entities that conduct commerce across platforms. But these tech firms are so large, so massive, so entrenched in their competitive position. How does something like AT Protocol eventually compete? Is this always a niche, narrow alternative just for nerds? How do you see it potentially breaking out? What would be the catalytic moment? Maybe you would argue that's just happened over the last couple of weeks, last couple of years, particularly in this moment, as you say, Zuckerberg goes the full Musk.

Robin Berjon:

I mean, it is hard to know if it's going to be enough before the dust has settled, but I do think we're living in such a moment, right? They have been multiple attempts at creating alternative social media systems and they have tended to wither and die on the vine, or at least to fail to attract large populations of non-geeky users. Bluesky is probably the first one to succeed on that dimension, and it keeps succeeding. It's still growing and growing. And now we're starting to see people building our Instagram analogs and building all kinds of other systems on the AT Protocol. So I really think that we are going through a moment when something is happening that is giving us momentum.

Now, as you say, these companies are huge. They remain huge, and so we're nowhere near success. However, if we manage to make an inroad in social media and to gain enough ground to get enough momentum, that creates an ecosystem that can then support forays into other parts. And so next we can maybe we do search or maybe we do browsers, or we can also look at things that have been done elsewhere. I think I'm thinking notably of, in India, the Beckn network, which is like an open transaction network, is competing rather effectively with Amazon in terms of e-commerce platforms and with Uber in terms of a ride hailing service as shared infrastructure. Those are things that we might be able to deploy elsewhere based on local interest and local rules and local governance. So I do think that there are things emerging, but obviously it's still early days, so it's hard to tell what will succeed.

Sean McDonald:

I think any conversation where you get the opportunity to quote Deb Chopra twice is a great conversation. One of Deb's canonical quotes that I say all the time is that negligence passed a point of repetition is indistinguishable from malice. This is neither the first social network, nor is it likely to be the last, but what we've learned again and again is that there are a common set of both technical business and governance questions that have toppled a number of previous social networks. And there is the moment that you are asking about, I do believe has happened in the last couple of months as the AT Protocol in Bluesky have grown tremendously, not only in size, but in reaction. We've noticed that communities are willing to leave, that creators and people who bring value to platforms are unhappy with the way that they're being treated in the long run and are understandably looking to build elsewhere.

And so I think that it's not just for nerds. It's for people who are broadly unhappy with Cory Doctorow's intensification of a bunch of things. And I think that what we're seeing is that there's a lot of opportunity here to learn lessons from previous social media failures and recognize that the technical infrastructure does not have to be all consumed by one community or one organization's business interests. And so this is an opportunity to make moves inside of the relatively complicated spaces that do exist to surface, as Robin's saying, a whole lot more opportunities both commercial and non-commercial that embrace the idea of participation and governance as a fundamental part of their operations going forward.

And so I think what we've seen is incontrovertible evidence of the impacts of ignoring these problems at a technical level, at a financial level, just at a very human bad experience level. And I think that the opportunity to engage and do better has catalyzed not only the group of custodians who are leading the charge here and the broader list of signatories who have said that these things are important, but the Free Our Feeds campaign is continuing to grow attention and momentum by people who are recognizing that there is now more effort to raise resources in support of this initiative in space. And so I think the opportunity is not only a technical one, but it is a one in the social and learned existence of social media and it's an opportunity to grow beyond and in a different way than we've seen before.

Justin Hendrix:

So I see 65,000 raised just in the first week alone on what looks like an initial $4 million goal. Perhaps we can check back in at some point, see how this project is doing. Certainly, I'm sure a lot of Tech Policy Press listeners will want to check it out. The website is freeourfeeds.com. Robin, Sean, thanks so much.

Sean McDonald:

Thank you.

Robin Berjon:

Thank you. It's been a pleasure as always.