Institutional regulatory instances fail in the face of the platforms’ rising powers. We are dependent on the platforms, just as the blind people in the tale are dependent on the sighted. But there is a way out. Only the query can control the query. For that to work, however, the data needs to be open, and so we too, will have to relinquish some control. Sooner or later, we will have to eat the bitter fruit; we will have to open all data up for unguarded aggregation and analysis. The only way of effectively preventing queries from being manipulated and used against us is by embracing redundancy. If Google really were the only competitor in the search engine sector, we would certainly be well advised to distrust it deeply. Thus far, though, everyone can create an index of the web and organize it at discretion, provided they have the appropriate technical and financial resources. And plenty of them do: Microsoft’s Bing, DuckDuckGo, Wolfram Alpha, and many others, work in more or less the same way as Google. Market share in that sense hardly matters, as long as there is the option of crosschecking queries. As long as competing queries can test whether Google is abusing its powers of the query on a grand scale, these powers are at least to some extent contained. However, in order for these reliability checks to remain in place, data needs to be queryable by everyone. Thanks to the open web, this is still the case. This approach, however, seems to be on the decline: Facebook, and more recently Twitter and other platforms, are increasingly shielding their data from third-party queries. That is the real issue at hand. So instead of demanding more privacy, we should convince platform operators to open up their data. Because the more open the data becomes, and the more queries can be applied to it, the easier it will be to fence in the power of platforms.
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