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 companies. Worse, the main business model for information itself, whether distributed by search, publishing, or social media—has become surveillance capitalism.
CuCo is developing a way to bypass this whole mess, called the Byway. It’s a way for people and businesses to connect through apps to talk to apps, free from platforms. Here is a comparison:
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Highway model
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Byway Model
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| Centralized on platforms | Decentralized, distributed, peer to peer, no platforms |
| Works by capture | Works by personal choice |
| Closed and proprietary markets | Free and open markets |
We are planning to build out a prototype for the Byway in Bloomington, Indiana, where Doc and Joyce Searls, two Customer Commons founders, are based while serving as visiting scholars with the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University.
For more, read the Intention Byway FAQ.
