Drafted by SOPA/PIPA opponents Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Darrell Issa, the OPEN Act offers an alternative to the strong-arm tactics discussed in the original pieces of legislation. Not only have Issa and Wyden drafted their own version, they also launched a website for like-minded individuals can keep up with the events associated with Internet regulation. The site goes by the KeepTheWebOpen.com TLD, and it offers a copy of the bill as well as a participation section.

The Online Protection & ENforemnt of Digital Trade Act (OPEN) bill, which can be downloaded here, is a direct opponent to SOPA/PIPA. One of the main areas of focus has to do with offering more protection for site owners in regards to being investigated. An example:

LIMITATION ON INVESTIGATIONS OF DOMAIN NAMES; CONSENT TO JURISDICTION. Notwithstanding any other provision of this section, the Commission may not initiate an investigation under paragraph (1) with respect to a domain name if the operator of the Internet site associated with the domain name
(A) provides in a legal notice on the site accurate information consisting of
(i) the name of an individual authorized to receive process on behalf of the site;
(ii) an address at which process may be served;
(iii) a telephone number at which the individual described in clause (i) may be contacted; and
(iv) a statement that the operator of the site
(I) consents to the jurisdiction and venue of the United States district courts with respect to a violation under section 506 of title 17, United States Code, a criminal offense under section 1204 of title 17, United States Code, for a violation of section 1201 of such title, or a violation of section 2320 of title 18 of such Code; and
(II) will accept service of process from the Attorney General with respect to those violations and the offense set forth in subclause (I); and
(B) upon the filing of any civil action in the appropriate United States district court
(i) for infringement of copyright under section 501 of title 17, United States Code,
(ii) under section 1203 of title 17, United States Code, for a violation of section 1201 of such title, or
(iii) under section 32(1) of the Lanham Act, accepts service and waives, in a timely manner, any objections to jurisdiction as set forth in the statement described in subparagraph (A)(iv).

As you can see, embedded within all that government speak/legalese is protections for site owners that has not been provided by either SOPA or PIPA. For those who think SOPA opposition is all about protecting the ability to download without intervention, think again, at least when in regards to the OPEN Act:

3) IDENTIFICATION OF, AND NOTICE TO, ENTITIES THAT MAY BE REQUIRED TO TAKE ACTION PURSUANT TO THIS SECTION.
(A) IDENTIFICATION. A complaint filed under paragraph (1) shall identify any financial transaction provider or Internet advertising service that may be required to take measures described in subsection (g)(2) if the Commission issues an order under subsection (f) with respect to the complaint and the order is served on the provider or service pursuant to subsection (g)(1).
(B) NOTICE. Upon filing a complaint under paragraph (1), the complainant shall provide notice to any financial transaction provider or Internet advertising service identified in the complaint pursuant to subparagraph (A) or any amendments to the complaint.
(C) INTERVENTION.
(i) IN GENERAL. A financial transaction provider or Internet advertising service identified in a complaint pursuant to subparagraph (A) may intervene upon timely request filed with the Commission in
(I) an investigation initiated under subsection (c) pursuant to the complaint; or
(II) pursuant to subsection (f)(5), an action to modify, suspend, or vacate an order issued pursuant to the complaint.
(ii) RULE OF CONSTRUCTION. Failure to intervene under clause (i) in an investigation under subsection (c) does not preclude a financial transaction provider or Internet advertising service notified of the investigation from subsequently seeking an order to modify, suspend, or terminate an order issued by the Commission under subsection (f).

Essentially, if a infringing site is receiving advertising money, the group that’s being infringed upon has recourses that don’t include the destruction of the DNS protocol. Both officials offered videos explaining their positions and why they adopted OPEN. First, Congressman Issa:

Marietje Schaake is a member of the European Parliament. This is not her first tweet about SOPA, either:

It’s safe to say Schaake would be on the side of Wyden and Issa. In fact, one hopes much of Europe is of the same mind as Switzerland.

Lead image courtesy.

Google says its users in kazakhstan may see a decrease in search quality, but that the company does not want to contribute to a fractured Internet. Here is the entire explanation from Google SVP, Research & Systems Infrastructure, Bill Coughan, as posted on the official Google Blog:

The genius of the Internet has always been its open infrastructure, which allows anyone with a connection to communicate with anyone else on the network. It’s not limited by national boundaries, and it facilitates free expression, commerce and innovation in ways that we could never have imagined even 20 or 30 years ago.

Some governments, however, are attempting to create borders on the web without full consideration of the consequences their actions may have on their own citizens and the economy. Last month, the Kazakhstan Network Information Centre notified us of an order issued by the Ministry of Communications and Information in Kazakhstan that requires all .kz domain names, such as google.kz, to operate on physical servers within the borders of that country. This requirement means that Google would have to route all searches on google.kzto servers located inside Kazakhstan. (Currently, when users search on any of our domains, our systems automatically handle those requests the fastest way possible, regardless of national boundaries.)

We find ourselves in a difficult situation: creating borders on the web raises important questions for us not only about network efficiency but also about user privacy and free expression. If we were to operate google.kz only via servers located inside Kazakhstan, we would be helping to create a fractured Internet. So we have decided to redirect users that visit google.kz to google.com in Kazakh. Unfortunately, this means that Kazakhstani users will experience a reduction in search quality as results will no longer be customized for Kazakhstan.

Measures that force Internet companies to choose between taking actions that harm the open web, or reducing the quality of their services, hurt users. We encourage governments and other stakeholders to work together to preserve an open Internet, which empowers local users, boosts local economies and encourages innovation around the globe.

It’s not that surprising that Google would make such a move, as the company has promoted an “open” web consistently for years, and after the ordeal with China, they made it clear that they’re not above pulling out of a country, and frankly, China is a much bigger economy than Kazakhstan.

Still, it is interesting that this comes at the sacrifice of search quality, and that Google is openly pointing this out, at a time when Google’s search quality has been heavily criticized and iterated upon relentlessly by the company, with recent algorithm updates.

His sentiments are reflected by open standards advocates everywhere, and those that appear to be diminishing the principles Berners-Lee and the like stand for are among some of the biggest players on the web. 

Berners-Lee calls out social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster for closing off data, as well as wireless providers and governments for hindering progress. "Large social-networking sites are walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web," he says. "Wireless Internet providers are being tempted to slow traffic to sites with which they have not made deals. Governments—totalitarian and democratic alike—are monitoring people’s online habits, endangering important human rights."

"If we, the Web’s users, allow these and other trends to proceed unchecked, the Web could be broken into fragmented islands. We could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want," he adds. "The ill effects could extend to smartphones and pads, which are also portals to the extensive information that the Web provides."

"Several threats to the Web’s universality have arisen recently," he later adds. "Cable television companies that sell Internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment. Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site."

Google and Apple are a couple more major companies that fail to escape Berners-Lee’s criticism. He calls out Apple for making iTunes a walled garden and Google’s joint proposal with Verizion, suggesting that wireless should be treated differently than wired, when it comes to net neutrality. 

He also says it’s "disturbing" that magazine publishers are turning to smartphone apps rather than web apps, because these too are closed off from the web itself. 

Interestingly, Berners-Lee cites web giant Amazon as more of an example of what can be accomplished because of open standards, noting that they were able to grow into the powerhouse they’ve become as a result of access to free, basic web technologies and standards. He also mentions Craigslist and Wikipedia as positive examples. 

Berners-Lee’s six-page report is an interesting look at the direction the web has taken after 20 years, from the guy that’s been there every step of the way. While much of his assessment is indeed a bit dark, there is some optimism sprinkled throughout. He admits that it is an "exciting time", and calls upon developers, businesses, governments, and citizens to work together to shape where the web goes from here. 

With some of the "closed" entities taking up such an exceedingly substantial amount of web user attention, however (not to mention the other powerful elements in play like the wireless/cable companies’ practices) it’s hard to imagine the direction changing drastically anytime soon. 

Facebook is reportedly accounting for about a quarter of all page views in the U.S. and it’s starting to push itself as users’ entry point to the web at large, while simultaneously moving to become users’ main entry point of communication (and likely payments in the not-too-distant future). 

Is Berners-Lee’s web doomed to become just an important part of history? An important step in the evolution of technology and communication? Can it survive on any mainstream level with all of these forces seemingly working against it while using it at the same time? 

Let us know what you think.

At Google I/O, Messina talked with us about several topics related to the open web, including Facebook’s "Open" graph, which has been heavily criticized for not really being that open.

Here is the interview:

More WebProNews Videos

We also spoke with Google’s Joseph Smarr at Google I/O. He talked about various open protocols and how they can help websites. He does a pretty good job of putting it into terms the non-techie can probably understand. Check that out here.

"There are a couple different ways to look at this as a website owner," he told us. "If you already use a sharing service like AddToAny, ShareThis, or AddThis, you might not notice much difference. However, OExchange makes it easier for those service providers to support less well-known sharing services. As such, that means that site owners may see a boost in attention from a wider audience than before."

He said that "because this may give rise to a long-tail of sharing providers, it’s possible that content will be shared across a wider and more diverse audience than before."

OExchange is just one of handful of open protocols that are being harnessed to smooth out the social web, and make for a more seamless user experience from site to site. Others include OpenID, OAuth, Webfinger, ActivityStrea.ms, PubsubHubbub, and Salmon.

Google is playing a large role in the advocacy of of these open protocols. Google Buzz, for example, places a great deal of emphasis on the kind of openness they provide, and the kind of openness that is frankly lacking from the much more popular (at least in terms of user count) "Open" graph of Facebook – by far, the largest social network.

At Google I/O last month, WebProNews spoke with Joseph Smarr of Google’s technical staff about various open protocols and how they can help websites. He does a pretty good job of putting it into terms the non-techie can probably understand:

More WebProNews Videos

"If you’re a webmaster and you’ve got a new site and you want people to check it out, you want to limit that friction as much as possible, right? You want to make it super easy for people to come and find out about who you are," says Smarr.

"It’s going to be better for you, and it’s going to be better for you users, who are going to have a much more convenient time," he says.

Smarr also makes an interesting point about the web in general. "The web started with the right open standards. You know, HTML and HTTP, and then anybody could just stand up a new webserver, and anybody could link to it, and that’s what allowed that incredible innovation to happen. So we basically want to get that same set of building blocks right on the social web…"

As Messina told us upon the launch of OExchange, "the benefits of any open protocol or technology really only offers dividends when it becomes widely adopted by many providers."

We also have an interview from Google I/O with Messina we will be posting on our Video Blog before long.

First, to get an idea of what OExhcange is about, the announcement sums it up this way:

The Social Web consists of a diverse and ever growing eco-system of services that enable you to share with your friends, blog, like, translate, e-mail, save for later and more. By providing access to these services to their readers, publishers maximize distribution of their content leading to increased monetization opportunities. However, because every service speaks a different language or has a different integration scheme, providing access to all these services is difficult. OExchange solves this problem by defining an open protocol for third party sharing tools to discover and send content to these services.

"There are a couple different ways to look at this as a website owner," Messina tells WebProNews. "If you already use a sharing service like AddToAny, ShareThis, or AddThis, you might not notice much difference. However, OExchange makes it easier for those service providers to support less well-known sharing services. As such, that means that site owners may see a boost in attention from a wider audience than before."

"Additionally, if you don’t use one of those services but instead manually host sharing buttons on your site, OExchange will make it easier to integrate sharing services that support the protocol, keeping integration and development costs down," he adds. "From the opposite perspective, if a business lets people share content into their site and they adopt OExchange, then it would be easier for other sites to point shared content at them."

We asked Messina how the protocol would increase the shareability of content. "Rather than ‘increasing the shareability of content’, OExchange simply makes it easier to personalize sharing interfaces and integrate with less well-known services," he responded. "However, because this may give rise to a long-tail of sharing providers, it’s possible that content will be shared across a wider and more diverse audience than before."

As Messina explained on a post on Google’s Social Web blog this week, the Google Buzz sharing API (which powers the Google Buzz Buttons) has supported the basic model of OExchange since it was first released.

"Google Buzz currently implements very basic support for OExchange — so the way that you post a new link to Buzz is identical to the way that you would share a link to any other site that supports OExchange," Messina says. "Put another way, if you implement support for sharing to Google Buzz using OExchange, you could easily add support for other social sharing services with very little work."

"To put this into perspective, the goal of OExchange is to lower the overhead of integrating with social sharing services," says Messina. "So, rather than having to investigate and learn about a bunch of different sharing protocols and APIs, you should only need to learn about OExchange to cover a large number of services."

"Of course the benefits of any open protocol or technology really only offers dividends when it becomes widely adopted by many providers, which is why Google is keen to support this emerging technology by helping to develop and improve it," he concludes.

He also recommends joining this mailing list if you wish to get involved with OExchange.

At least that’s the hope. Diaspora, doesn’t actually exist yet, but it’s raising funding, expectations, and a significant amount of interest from third-parties wanting to help out the group of young guys responsible for its existence.
The group has made more money that it asked for, and has posted an update to its blog today addressing where they’re at with the project:

Our basic plan is the same: we’re going to build a great lightweight decentralized social networking framework and release it as AGPL software. We’re going to use the extra money to help us reach that goal and to keep improving Diaspora after this summer, and possibly supplement our ramen with the occasional apple.

We’re also getting in touch with other projects in the space. We had a great talk with the guys behind Ostatus earlier this week, and we are excited to implement the Ostatus standards.

OStatus is described as an open standard for distributed status updates with the goal of specification that allows different messaging hubs to route status updates between users in near-real-time. It builds upon protocols like PubSubHubbub, Webfinger, ActivityStreams and Salmon – those generally associated with the open web.

In Diaspora’s initial description of itself, it said, "We are 140-character ideas. We are the pictures of your cat. We are blog posts about the economy. We are the collective knowledge that is Wikipedia."

If the goal is to provide a legitimate alternative to Facebook, Diaspora has a large mountain to climb. No matter how great the product ends up being, it’s going to take getting the masses to sign on, and the masses are Facebook’s greatest asset. Can the enthusiasm of the tech community translate to the average Facebook user? Tell us what you think.

The New York Times says "people familiar with Facebook’s plans" say the company will introduce a "Like" button for publishers to put on their own web pages, as well as a toolbar. "The Like button will allow Facebook to keep a record of what a user linked to, providing the company with ever more data about people’s preferences," says the NYT. "Facebook, in turn, plans to share that data with Web publishers, so that a magazine Web site, for instance, may be able to show users all the articles that their friends like."

Facebook the company is being pretty tight-lipped about its plans ahead of the conference, but following speculation that it would use data from sites with the button/toolbar to target Facebook ads, a spokesperson for the company told the Financial Times, "All the products we are launching at F8 are focused on giving developers and entrepreneurs ways to make the web more social," said the spokesperson. "We have no announcements or changes planned to our ad offering and policies."

Facebook is already consuming a great deal of users’ online time for content alone (not to mention communication): status updates, gaming, music, video, news, etc.

E-Commerce

Some are expecting some interesting announcements at the conference regarding Facebook credits, the company’s virtual currency. As InsideFacebook reported the other day, the company has partnered with a couple of new offer providers so users can earn credits without having to pay directly, a move reporter Eric Eldon thinks could lead to increased spending on credits, which may become significant to not only Facebook e-commerce, but e-commerce in general, as more e-tailers look to capitalize on Facebook’s huge user base. Take a look at this new announcement from Facebook app Payvment to see what I mean.

ID

With regard to Facebook infiltrating more of the web per its expected announcements, the company still gets to deal with competition in this space. Twitter made its @anywhere platform widely available last week, for example. Google also released its official Buzz buttons for sites (while also finding a way to integrate Google Services for Websites into way more sites). Meanwhile, open web efforts are making significant progress (the first open cross social network implementation via the Salmon protocol was launched a couple weeks ago). Now you have Google, Yahoo, and MySpace participating in XAuth with Meebo.

Pete Cashmore, founder of the all things social media blog Mashable makes a great point about Facebook related to this. "It’s in Facebook’s interests to lock up your social graph, and it’s in your best interests that they don’t," he says. "If Twitter, Google or another player were to make your social graph portable, you wouldn’t be siloing all your information in Facebook — you could do whatever you please with it….The question that will decide Facebook’s fate: Can it keep the social graph locked up forever?"

The more Facebook becomes part of the fabric of the web, the more users may feel tied to it, but as Marshall Kirkpatrick recently suggested, Facebook could feel pressure to implement such open web protocols if enough of the community implements them. Facebook’s best interest is to keep users using Facebook itself, but considering Facebook already has such a significant share of the population, you have to wonder how much it would really lose open protocols were adopted.

As for F8, Facebook has released its schedule, which includes tracks for New Tools, Industry, Techniques, and Open Technologies. It will be very interesting to see what all announcements are made at the conference, there may very well be more we don’t even know about yet.

How much of your online use is going to be related to Facebook? Share your thoughts here.

Would you find value in communicating with a user of a social network you didn’t belong to? Tell us what you think.

I reached out to Google’s own open web advocate, Chris Messina, to get his thoughts on this milestone and its significance for social networking, and for businesses.

What’s it Mean for Social Networking?

"I do think that Salmon is a very important building block technology for the open, social web," Messina tells WebProNews. "It basically provides a mechanism for what I would call ‘personal trackbacks’ or ‘social pingbacks’ — to borrow the blogging term."

Imagine: If Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, and MySpace all implemented Salmon in the way that Cliqset and Status.net have. Users of any one of these services could communicate with users on any of the others without having to be part of those other communities. For example, if I’m a Facebook user, but not a Twitter user, I could respond to a tweet from somebody from my Facebook account, which they would see on Twitter. All the while, I do not have a Twitter account. They could then in turn respond to me, and I would see that in my Facebook account.

Right now, social network users can’t do this, unless they’re using Cliqset and Status.net, but depending on how widely this gets adopted, it could become more of a standard in the future, which would make for increased competition in the social network space. People wouldn’t necessarily have to join Facebook just to stay in touch with all of their friends and family who use it. If they liked MySpace better, for example, they could continue using that as their preferred social network, and still communicate with anybody else. As Marshall Kirkpatrick recently suggested, this would mean social networks would have to strive to innovate more, to keep users from simply moving elsewhere.

"This is a great demonstration of Cliqset’s larger vision of social networks being siteless, and we think it’s going to be the future of how all services interact and, more importantly, how users of these services interact," Cliqset told us earlier.

"With the ability to mention someone on one service and then send a verified ping to the recipient’s service, we get one step closer to decentralizing social networks in the same way that email was decentralized a decade or longer ago," Messina says. "For today, this means that if you prefer to use Cliqset, and I use Status.net — but I want to talk to you without signing up for Cliqset  — Salmon will make that possible!" (emphasis added)

"Put another way, let’s say that I post a photo to both Flickr and my blog, and let’s presume that I would like to have one unified set of comments for that object — rather than two distinct streams of comments," Messina adds. "Salmon provides the mechanism to sync those two channels so that, once again, Flickr users can use Flickr, and my blog readers can read my blog."

What Impact Could This Have for Businesses?

Social networking has become a significant part of marketing, customer service, branding, and engaging with customers. It only makes sense that if social networking were to become more open in the way that widespread Salmon adoption would allow, business communication channels could open up along with them. Communication would improve.

"The benefits for business become clear then: produce quality content, syndicate to any number of services or aggregators, and then use Salmon as a way to host distributed conversations across the web — rather than in several disconnected contexts," says Messina. "This means more engagement and higher convenience for publishers — and a more familiar experience for content consumers."

What are the odds?

A lot still has to happen for social networking in general to reach this point. Right now, we’re really only at the beginning. Cliqset and Status.net are hardly representative of social media as a whole. However, Google Buzz, while certainly not as dominant as say, Facebook, will be implementing Salmon sooner or later, and you can bet others will follow. Kirkpatrick made the point that because Salmon is open source, any service can implement it without formal business relationships.

"If a substantial portion of the technical community implements Salmon, Facebook could be under a lot of pressure to do so as well. (As it was with OpenID, for example)," he says.

Facebook’s best interest, however, is to keep users using Facebook itself. Considering Facebook already has such a significant share of the population, you have to wonder how much it would really lose if it adopted this. It may also be in Facebook’s best interest to keep users happy, and that could potentially include tearing down a wall for users who don’t want to be closed off from the rest of the world.

Time will tell if this all comes to fruition, but Cliqset and status.net have shown that it can be done, and that’s an important first step.

On the subject of social media getting more convenient for businesses, enterprise software company Salesforce.com made some significant announcements this week involving integrating social media more into the enterprise. Read about our discussion with the company about that here.

Would you like to see social networks open up to cross-communication? Share your thoughts here.

Shiny Object Syndrome

As 10e20 President Chris Winfield discussed with us at Search Engine Strategies last week, a lot of people get caught up in "shiny object syndrome". This is essentially where businesses get caught up in the hype surrounding the latest service, trend, or fad, and feel like they have to be involved to stay relevant, and jump in because of that.

This is not the best way to go about things. "You should never get involved in something, just because you think you have to," he said.

Winfield made a great point: think about if you had put a large amount of time and money into a Friendster strategy or an Orkut strategy, only to find that these networks would never offer you the benefits you could’ve received from using these resources on a Facebook strategy.

It’s important to consider your goals and think about what you need to measure in your social media efforts, from a business standpoint. "Not all companies should be measuring the same exact things," notes Winfield.

Portability

Perhaps the best approach you can take is to have a relatively portable social media strategy. In other words, look for ways to engage with customers that don’t limit you to a particular service. That way, if they flock to a new one in the future, you can go along with minimal hassle. Maintain consistency in your brand’s persona and how you deal with customers, and you’ll probably find that this can be transported from one channel to another, despite technological adjustments that may need to be made to the strategy.

One good thing that businesses likely have to look forward to is a more open web, which will allow users of separate services to communicate with one another. Just yesterday, Cliqset and Status.net claimed to have implemented the first live example of the Salmon protocol, and for the first time ever, the users of two independent, public web entities are able to communicate with each other, without being on the same service as the person they are communicating with.

"This is a great demonstration of Cliqset’s larger vision of social networks being siteless, and we think it’s going to be the future of how all services interact and, more importantly, how users of these services interact," Cliqset tells WebPronews. Major social media players are already heavily involved in similar initiatives.