
by Mike Masnick at TechDirt
There’s a fundamental architectural flaw in how the internet works that most people have never heard of, but it explains nearly every frustration you have with modern technology. Why your photos are trapped in Apple’s ecosystem. Why you can’t easily move data between apps. Why every promising new service starts from scratch, knowing nothing about you. And most importantly, why AI—for all its revolutionary potential—risks making Big Tech even bigger instead of putting powerful tools in your hands.
Former Google and Stripe executive Alex Komoroske (who recently wrote for us about why the future of AI need not be centralized) has written an equally brilliant analysis that traces all of these problems back to something called the “same origin paradigm”—a quick security fix that Netscape’s browser team implemented one night in the 1990s that somehow became the invisible physics governing all modern software.
The same origin paradigm is simple but devastating: Every website and app exists in its own completely isolated universe. Amazon and Google might as well be on different planets as far as your browser is concerned. The Instagram app and the Uber app on your phone can never directly share information. This isolation was meant to keep you safe, but it created something Komoroske calls “the aggregation ratchet”—a system where data naturally flows toward whoever can accumulate the most of it.
This is a much clearer explanation of a problem I identified almost two decades ago—the fundamental absurdity of having to keep uploading the same data to new services, rather than being able to tell a service to access our data at a specific location on the internet. Back then, I argued that the entire point of the open internet shouldn’t be locking up data in private silos, but enabling users to control their data and grant services access to it on their own terms, for their own benefit.
What Komoroske’s analysis reveals is the architectural root cause of…
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