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 has developed 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:
|
Highway model
|
Byway Model
|
| Centralized on platforms | Distributed, peer to peer, no platforms |
| Works by capture | Works by personal choice |
| Closed and proprietary markets | Free and open markets |
The Byway is being built right now for testing in Bloomington, Indiana, with research by the Ostrom Workshop at Indiana University.
For more, read the Intention Byway FAQ.
