The Future of Platform Power: Making Middleware Work

Unlike many other proposals to curtail platform power,
middleware does not violate the First Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution. In the United States, that makes middleware a path
forward in a neighborhood full of dead ends. Before we can execute
on the middleware vision, however, at least four problems must be
solved. First, how technologically feasible is it for competitors
to remotely process massive quantities of platform data? Second,
how is everyone going to get paid? Third, who will bear the
enormous costs of content curation? And fourth, how does middleware
address privacy issues regarding users’ friends’ data? We have to
solve these problems to make middleware work—but this is also what
makes the concept so promising.