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Author: Doc Searls

  • Why the EU’s Digital Omnibus needs section 88b put back and improved

    To Google, Meta, the IAB, and the whole “interactive” advertising business, your privacy is a bug, not a feature. The less privacy you have, the more money they make. That’s why they lobbied section 88b out of the EU Digital Omnibus bill, and why they want to preserve the broken, hated ‘consent’ system behind every cookie…

  • Surf’s Up for Personal Agency Online

    Welcome to what the Internet started promising in 1974—     Talking here about what Cluetrain said in 1999— What ProjectVRM has been about since 2006— What it said in The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge—  

  • Welcome to VRM Day 2026a!

    This is the moment Digital markets are undergoing dynamic structural change in how personal data relationships are managed, governed, and trusted. While the Internet and the Web promised a networked economy based on full personal agency, today we find ourselves trapped inside corporate silos while organisations of all kinds face rising compliance costs, minimized trust, and…

  • Meet Omie: a truly personal mobile device

    This is Omie: She is, literally, a clean slate. And she is your clean slate. Not Apple’s. Not Google’s. Not some phone company’s. She can be what you want her to be, do what you want her to do, run whatever apps you want her to run, and use data you alone collect and control. Being a…

  • Our new look

    As you see, we’ve been at work. Thanks to Justin Byrd, of Machi-Systems, and his patient instruction of other Customer Commons folk, we have a modern site that’s far more ready than it was to handle the traffic that will surely come when IEEE P7012 gets implemented at scale, which is the plan. Stay tuned…

  • Choosing Your Terms

    Customer Commons was designed to be for personal privacy terms what Creative Commons is for personal copyright licenses. So far we have one privacy term here, called NoStalking. It’s an agreement a person chooses when they want another party not to track them away from their site or service, but still allows ads to be…

  • Is Mastodon a collection of commons?

    Glenn Fleishman has a lucid and helpful introduction to Mastodon in TidBITS that opens with this: Cast your mind back to the first time you experienced joy and wonder on the Internet. Do you worry you’ll never be able to capture that sense again? If so, it’s worth wading gently into the world of Mastodon…

  • Playing Poly

    Poly is a game. Or will be. We’re working on it. It’s a multi-player game. As are markets. Although Poly does not need to be a game about business (though it could be), the idea is to explore how markets work when customers bring abilities to the market’s table that defaulted business practices prevent.  …

  • The Byway has an FAQ

    It’s here, and it’s new. We’ll soon have an email address to which you can send questions. Stay tuned for that.

  • Byway

    On the commercial Internet today, “free market” has come to mean “your choice of captor.” And, as captors have grown, the “information highway” of 1995 has in 2021 become a collection of private lanes, each controlled by single companies. On this highway, those companies enjoy scale across many customers, while customers lack scale across many…