Doc Searls's Blog

Imagine no more cookie notices.

Imagine no more Internet of Nothing But Accounts.

Imagine no more surveillance panopticons.

Imagine no more privacy in the hands of everybody but you.

Imagine no more creepy adtech.

Then thank MyTerms for making those possible.

It’s not a new idea.

It’s what we got with the Internet and its founding protocols, TCP and IP (1974).

It’s what we got with the Web and with its founding protocol, HTTP (1989).

It’s what we got with dozens of other members of the Internet Protocol Suite, plus other graces, such as RSS, which we can thank every time we hear “and wherever you get your podcasts.”

It’s what we got with all those and other protocols that are end-to-end, i.e. peer-to-peer, by design.

It’s not what we got from business-as-usual, which thought the Internet and everything that made it work was for them, and not for all of us. They saw us as mere users and consumers of their products and services, and not the independent and self-sovereign free agents the Internet and its protocols supported in the first places.

Want evidence of the mentality involved? Listen to marketing folks calling us “targets,” to “acquire,” herd through a “funnel,” and then “manage,” “control,” and “lock in” as if we were slaves or cattle.

We’ve been working on getting us out of this mess since the last millennium. Examples: The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999), the Buyer Centric Commerce Forum (2004), ProjectVRM (2006), The Intention Economy (2012), Customer Commons (2013), and finally, IEEE P7012 (2017).

All those efforts have now borne fruit in the completion of IEEE P7012, which is nicnamed MyTerms, much as IEEE 802.11 is nickanmed Wi-Fi.

And now MyTerms has its own website: https://myterms.info.

MyTerms is a standard that the P7012 working group, which I chair, has just completed after eight years in the works. It is due to be published by the IEEE on January 22, 2026.

MyTerms describes how the sites and services of the world agree to your terms, rather than the other way around. It says your agreements with those sites and services are contracts you both agree to, rather than the empty promises that come when you click on cookie notice “choices.” These agreements are ones both sides store in ways that can be audited and disputed, should the need arise.

The process is made simple—by limiting your chosen agreement to one among the handful kept on a roster in a site published by a disinterested nonprofit, such as Customer Commons, on the model established by Creative Commons. There will be a number of those sites, for different countries and regions.

We’re starting with five agreements. The default one is SD-BASE, which says “service delivery only.” SD-BASE says what you get from a site or a service is what you expect when you walk into a store in the natural world: just their business, whether it be luggage, lunch, or lingerie. Not to be tracked elsewhere like a marked animal or to have information about you sold or handed over to other parties—which is the norm today in the digital world.

Other variants cover data portability, data use for AI training, data for good, and data for intentcasting.

In the natural world we worked out privacy many millenia ago. We started with the privacy tech we call clothing and shelter. Then we developed social contracts that were almost entirely tacit, meaning we knew more about them than we could tell, but everyone understood how things worked.

But there is no tacit in the digital world. Everything there needs to be made explicit: written into code. In the absence of explicit agreements about what privacy is, and how it works, we’re stuck with this icky tacit understanding by business-as-usual: that following people without their express invitation or a court order is just fine, and worth $trillions.

With MyTerms we can have $trillions more. Because far more business is possible when customers have scale, and an abuncance of mutually trusted market intelligence can flow both ways between customers and companies in the open marketplace.

Obviously, we can use help. If you’re interested in putting your shoulder to any of the wheels we’re pushing forward, write to contact@myterms.info.

And the Green Season begins

The fire season is officially over in Santa Barbara and the rest of Southern California. Noozhawk: "The recent storm brought more than 9.5 inches of rain to the city of Santa Barbara, marking the wettest start to a rainy season in 127 years of recordkeeping."

In case you thought there was real competition in Big AI

Steven Levy says there is only one AI company. He calls it The Blob.

S****iri will use Gemini?

That's what it says here. Also, for reasons I don't know, the word "Siri" in the subhead above is typed exactly that way, yet turns into "S****iri" when published. In the vernacular of medicine, this is a "fascinoma."

We need, and still don't have, truly personal AI

John Battelle: 

Imagine a GPT chatbot that you own, trust, and control. Let’s call it a genie, because honestly, that’s the most appropriate word for this new entity. This genie has access to everything you do on your phone, your computer, and sure, why not — your Alexa, your car, basically every digital surface with which you interact. Imagine it’s bounded by immutable rules that state you and you alone can tell it what to do, what information to share, what services to connect to, on what terms, and so on. Now imagine you can ask that genie to perform all manner of magic on your behalf — pretty much any question you can think of, it will figure out an answer… How about negotiating a way better deal with your healthcare provider by threatening to move to competitors? Done! Once you’re happy with that healthcare provider, can you ask your genie to file all your claims and make sure you get reimbursed by checking your bank statements? Why yes you can! Your wish has been granted!

My point was this: That “genie” should work for YOU, not for OpenAI, Target, or your health insurance provider. You.

Hiss

After AM Cuts, Tesla Dropping FM Radio From Entry Level Models.

I want one

Companion Intelligence looks very close to what I've been calling for here.

What's the opposite?

Darius Van Arman has a lot to say about market concentration. (For reasons I can't grok, the long headline is uncopyable.)

Daniel Barkhuff has a serious one-liner bio (“Husband, Dad, Emergency Medicine physician, Veteran”) and speaks with earned authority from all of them, especially the last two. His latest, On Living Memory, reminds me of two dads.

One is my father, who re-enlisted in 1944 at age 35, because he wanted to fight in The War. Among other things, he participated in liberating a concentration camp. Afterward, he hated dentistry because drilling teeth smelled like burning bone. That was all he wanted to say about it. He also avoided fireworks because his main job in the Signal Corps was running ahead of blasting cannons on advancing lines, laying communication cables to forward locations, getting as close as possible to enemy positions.

The other was  Jim Hodksins, father of David, my long-time business partner, and three other sons. The obituary text on Jim Hodskins’ FindaGrave page says this: “Jim saw combat action in Europe, and served until he was badly injured in January, 1945. For his service, Jim was awarded the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart, the Infantry Combat Badge, and several other achievement ribbons and medals.” David told me his dad seldom talked about The War, despite or perhaps because of all those ribbons and medals. His pride was invested elsewhere.

Both those dads are now gone, and with them the memory of what they fought and why. Read what Barkhuff says about that.

Bonus link.

Busy Day Today

I'm giving this talk at 4pm Eastern today. The longer I work on it, the more audacious it seems.

In November no less

There's a thunderstorm going on. Bright flashes, deep booms. And it's just 44° out there.

Just a question

If we Thank God It's Friday, should we Blame Satan It's Monday?

Dawn in Southern Indiana, and there isn't a cloud in the sky. And Hoosiers football remains amazing.

It is still possible to navigate your plane in some areas using NDBs—non-directional beacons. Most have vanished in the age of GPS, but the great William Hepburn keeps a list.  Of related interest: Low Frequency Radio Range and Adcock antennas. I know this is boring shit, but not to me—and maybe not to a few readers. Less boring (especially after last week's spectacular auroras seen as far south as Florida): NASA's Space Weather Prediction Center.

Orgeny is one of the ways the Earth's crust gives rebirth to itself.  That's boring too, except for geologists and wannabes such as myself.

Interesting (for a few of us) that US federal agencies no longer carry notices about "the Democrat-led government shutdown" and other political digs.

Cluetrain is in an Epstein file, as are the names of its authors, mine misspelled.

A cool space launch from Vandenberg is scheduled for Sunday at 9:02pm. That's an hour when it's likely to leave a "jellyfish" exhaust where sunlight hits it while it's night below.

I just appended an update what I wrote about classical KDFC in San Francisco almost 15 years ago. The station now has five signals and is #3 in the ratings.

Apple launches Digital ID, a way to carry your passport on your phone for use at TSA checkpoints.

A case against AI panic.

Orthodox journalism has a problem with the heterodox kind. Such as Michael Wolff. Dave says it's because Wolff is independent. I agree, but it's more than that. Wolff is gonzo. Bonus link: Notes Toward a Journalism of Consciousness, by D. Patrick Miller, in The Sun, one of the best magazines on Earth. Published in 1990, it has haunted me ever since.

A flying car for $190k. Looks like a drone to me.

The AM-FM radio business is being discussed in a mailing list I’m on, but my mail server has a spam sphincter that won’t allow linky emails to go out, no matter how non-spammy they might be. So I’m posting some of what I’m trying to say here, so I can point to it.

Here is Pew from 2023.

Here is Nielsen, via Radio World, same year.

For another angle on this, look at the ratings at Radio Online. In those, public radio stations are mostly even, or gaining. I’ll visit that below.

Edison Research says AM-FM radio’s share-of-ear was 34% in 2023, down from 50% in 2014.

This Edison Research report (supporting Amazon Ads) in 2023 says streaming audio at that time had a 40% share of total audio time among U.S. adults, which was up ~160% in ten years.

And this Pew fact sheet has more numbers, some of them from Edison.

Meanwhile public radio listening has fallen. But its shares have not. For most of the listed stations, they’ve gone up a bit. This says the overall listening pie is smaller.

At best AM-FM radio (and over-the-air television) are what investors call distressed assets. They’re making money and not going away soon, but there is no significant new investment in plant, or anything, and lots of cost cutting.

But people are not listening less to audio. The opportunities, then, are in other forms of listening, all in the digital world.