What an enormous example of society getting scared, freaking out, & causing pic damage. The UK giving it's Competition & Markets Authority (friends of the ad industry) right to define how the internet works, to prevent change is a nightmare.

There's definitely a lot to be scared of with Google. And Mark starts off with the hardest, most accurate truth truth:

> Google’s efforts to improve privacy by removing support for third-party cookies in Chrome have attracted the CMA’s attention, because doing so can be seen to give Google an upper hand in the advertising and publishing markets, since Google will retain access to first-party tracking information.

Yet overall I think overall Google's handful of web community/ web spec folks continue to be fighting the good fight with what resources they have. Removing the third party cookies the ad networks rely on is kind of necessary, it's been in the cards for a while. Yet now the nations of the world are coming to pick apart & insert themselves into how the world wide web gets made, injecting themselves in. This will be so ineffectual, such a mire & muck, & will just sap us more and more and more over time.

Today is a day where I feel like singing a dirge for A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace[1]. Nations have invaded the cybermediums, have let the old guard beset open possibility & advancement with staid petty issues of business. I feel more and more alone, for holding a torch for the web, for seeing it as an expansive ever growing enrichening hypermedium that has sent us so far & which, in my view, has gotten only better. Sure big companies have outsized presence, but there's been no barriers to growth, no barriers to use: the platform has grown, enriched itself, WICG[2] does an amazing job trying to help us further the platform. And it's been accessible to any use, to any possibility. Anyone can start the next big thing, and not include survelliance at the same time. Anyone can start their own big personal thing, create their own experience, map out their own site. I don't see, like so many others, big tech as causing problems, as controlling the web, although I agree they have many bad practices, practices repeatedly widely, by most media companies, by most companies period, online. But I don't see them as doing bad to the web itself. The power structures of the internet & the web have been deeply decentralized, have been available to so many. And now, a nation is beginning to plant their flag on that infinite turf. To declare themselves the governor of it. I think it's a mistake, and it's certainly an end of an era, a sad one, where, to me, we were once free to explore ideas & mediums.

P.S.: I'm particularly thankful to Mark's discussion on how it's not just the big entities that need to be involved with wayfinding our civilization through these moments. Tapping the virtuous ActivityStream folk & other small entities to help figure out what interop can be, what possibilities we might want to move towards seems obvious to me. Mark pointing out that data-portability might end up not giving us any more agency or access seemed all too on the nose for what kind of a nightmare we might end up with if ACCESS Act goes bad, but like Mark, I have hope for it too.

[1] https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence

[2] https://wicg.io