Bait and Switching Costs - How Big Tech Took the Web and How to Take It Back

The talk opens with the early 1990s push by large technology companies to build interactive television as a walled garden, a vision that lost out to the open web. The speaker argues that a similar enclosure has returned, and that the main reason people stay on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook is switching costs: years of social investment cannot be carried to a rival service, and a feed can be filled with content the user did not choose.

The middle of the talk sets out a design for open services. The account belongs to the user, and its identifier is a cryptographic fingerprint the user controls rather than a domain or provider name. Contacts and their cryptographic context synchronise across a person's devices, and threshold secret sharing lets the user revoke a lost device while keeping the service unable to decrypt data alone. The speaker also separates publishing from curation, so users can subscribe to curators they can drop, and proposes a phased rollout covering contacts, messaging, chat and calls, and connected devices.

The talk closes with the deployment problem, since network effects work against any new system until it reaches critical mass. Questions covered post-quantum migration, recovery after disaster, revocation in divorces, and the role of regulators. The takeaway for practitioners is to reduce switching costs before adopting any service, especially free ones, and to bring technical designs to policymakers that they can turn into requirements.