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.