Our mission is to make the world more open and connected.
The filing also describes Facebook’s advertising business: reaching people according to their age, location, and interests, and using their friendships as social context for ads. [01]
On the internet and how it developedNo. 001 / September 2026
The internet
we might
have built.
I was born in 1993 and grew up with the web. Its development was already underway. I don’t believe its possibilities depended on the companies behind services such as Facebook, Google Search, and YouTube, or that those services’ popularity tells us which version would have served us best.
Read the essayPEOPLE, PLACES & IDEAS
somewhere on the websomeone sent
you a link
you a link
01 / GROWING UP WITH THE WEB
Growing up
with the web.
The web I used growing up already had people sharing information, building communities, and making useful things available. It also had awkward tools and plenty of problems to solve. When the companies behind social networks, search engines, and video-sharing sites describe connecting people and making information accessible as their purpose, I hear them describing work that was already happening.
I see that earlier web as a starting point for continued development by many different people and organizations. Webmasters, communities, public institutions, and companies could build on shared tools, combine services, and improve them. The people who did that work deserve credit for their contributions. The history gives me no reason to treat the eventual owners of the most popular services as the only people who could have carried it forward.
A social platform such as Facebook brings accounts, publishing, conversations, and discovery into a system run by its owner, Meta. I can value those tools while questioning how Facebook became a place so many of us felt we had to use. Its popularity does not establish that the company’s terms were the best available, or that another service could not have served us better with time and support.
MARK ZUCKERBERG / 2019
I realized you could find almost anything on the internet […] except the thing that matters most: people.
Email, forums, chat rooms, and personal pages already made it possible to find people through what they knew, made, enjoyed, and cared about. Facebook organized that activity around a particular kind of identity and social network, then made that arrangement widely available.
Zuckerberg had acknowledged that longer history in 2012. [04] In 2019, he argued that advertising was a way to make Facebook affordable to everyone.
Our mission is to give everyone a voice and show them the world.
Google describes ads on YouTube that can use information supplied by advertisers, as well as activity from other services and devices. Sharing or watching a video takes place inside that wider advertising system. [19]
Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful
Google describes following up on a visit to a shop’s website with ads on other sites, and potentially in later searches. The information service also gives businesses ways to keep reaching a prospective customer. [19]
give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers.
The filing describes using follows, replies, retweets, clicked links, and location to infer interests for ad targeting. Relationships and activity supplied signals for selecting advertisements. [16]
Our mission is to bring community, belonging, and empowerment to everyone in the world.
The filing describes user activity as an input to advertising and discusses licensing Reddit data for uses including AI training. Conversations and advice became both a shared resource and a commercial asset. [17]
Our products empower people to express themselves, live in the moment, learn about the world, and have fun together.
Snap reports a campaign in which optimizing for swipe-ups improved the advertiser’s cost per response and Snap’s revenue per impression. User interaction was also something the product could measure and sell to advertisers. [18]
A social purpose and a commercial business can coexist. The same relationships, viewing habits, contributions, and attention that make a service useful also become valuable to the company running it.
What I question is the assumption that these benefits depended on the particular arrangements that became dominant. Other builders would also have needed time and support to develop.
What might have developed
in the same time?
SHARED FOUNDATIONSWeb standards,
software, communities
software, communities
Shared sign-in and communication across providers already have a history of development through open standards. [32] [11] Communities can use hosted software instead of building and maintaining every tool themselves. With continued work, those pieces could have become easier to use together, alongside better ways to discover communities and move posts and archives between services.
Other builders could have spent the same years improving the web, given resources and opportunities to reach people. They could have supplied tools for separate communities or built widely used social networks and media sites with different expectations about growth, revenue, and users’ control. The success of particular companies does not establish that the capabilities we value depended on their ownership or business terms.
02 / SHARED FOUNDATIONS
What was
already growing.
My own memories begin with the web already in use. ARPANET and the early bulletin board systems belong to a history I learned about later.
I mostly went on IRC to ask a bot for an FTP address where I could find firmware files and related tools. Getting what I needed involved moving between services and following a process someone else had set up. That was one small way I encountered the work people did to make things available to each other.
Email could travel between independently run systems, discussions could be shared across servers, and web pages could link to work hosted elsewhere. People could build a useful part of the experience without providing all of it.
1982MAIL
protocol / SMTP
Mail between
different systems
RFC 821 specifies mail transfer and relaying between systems. A shared protocol let independently operated systems exchange messages. [05]
1986DISCUSSION
protocol / NNTP
+ a shared interest ↳ a question ↳ a thoughtful reply ↳ see you tomorrow
RFC 977 describes the distribution, retrieval and posting of news articles, with Usenet discussions organized into newsgroups. [06]
1992THE WEB
document / hypertext
My home pagePhotos and projectsFriends’ pagesLinks I’ve collected
A preserved 1992 World Wide Web project page links outward to documents, software and people. Publishing included linking to work hosted elsewhere. [07]
1993LIVE CHAT
protocol / IRC
> joined #somewhere<someone> hey, you’re back<you> of course▌
RFC 1459 documents real-time group and private conversations across an IRC network. [08]
Illustrations of early internet tools. Dates refer to the linked documents.
CERN / 30 APRIL 1993Making it possible
Making it possible
for others
to build.
CERN released its basic web client, server, and common code library into the public domain in 1993, allowing others to use, change, and distribute them. [12]
That release made the web’s basic tools available for others to develop. Later services could add something valuable while building on work they did not own or invent. The ability to build extended beyond any particular company, even though resources and opportunities were unevenly distributed.
Work shared by
Facebook and Google.
Facebook and Google also contributed to these shared foundations. Their Open Compute and Kubernetes projects made substantial engineering work available for other organizations to use and improve. This is part of what I value about their contribution: it can support development beyond the services they own.
Sharing designs for data centers
Facebook published designs for servers, power supplies, racks, and data-center facilities through the Open Compute Project. Work developed to make its own infrastructure more efficient became available for other organizations to use and improve. Sharing those designs gave others a starting point for their own engineering. [25]
Software other services can build on
Google released Kubernetes in 2014, sharing software for running applications across groups of computers. In 2015 it contributed the project to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. Other organizations could use and develop it, while Google also used it in its own cloud service. [26]
03 / COMMUNITIES AND SHARED TOOLS
Communities and
the systems
they use.
The web I knew let a useful experience extend across places with different owners. Social networks such as Facebook and Reddit brought more of that experience into their own systems, while still organizing people around particular interests. Running a community, supplying its tools, and helping people find it do not all have to belong to the same company.
Using several
services together.
You could meet someone through a Neopets guild or a forum and exchange AIM screen names. The relationship could continue through another service, without one company supplying the whole experience.
Photobucket and DeviantArt were part of that web too, with different purposes and communities around images. DeviantArt’s 2009 sharing tools helped artists bring their work to sites such as LiveJournal and MySpace, with credit and links back. [48] A picture hosted on Photobucket could appear directly inside a forum post, blog, or personal page. The host supplied the file while another site gave it context. [40]
IMAGE HOST
Stores and serves the file
FORUM OR PERSONAL SITE
Displays it in another context
What mattered was the freedom to combine services, and the terms on which they worked together. A site could help make other places useful. Keeping those connections dependable was part of the work of supporting the web.
Groups and communities
on Facebook and Reddit.
Facebook Groups and Reddit’s subreddits organize their wider social networks around particular interests, with ongoing conversations and people who help look after them. Gathering people into a large service still leaves this work to do.
Finding a place to join is another part of that work. Feed ranking selects what someone sees; groups provide places to return to. Facebook and Reddit supply both kinds of tools within the services they run.
Ranking the feed
far too much information for any one person to consume.
Adam Mosseri used those words to describe the volume of posts as Facebook grew. He connected that growth to the need to rank what people saw. Ranking gives Facebook a role in deciding which posts reach each person. [21]
Finding a group
In 2017, Facebook set a goal of helping a billion people join meaningful communities, describing groups built around neighborhoods, interests, and shared experiences. [22]
Its 2020 recommendation guidelines describe using people’s interests and actions to suggest Groups, Pages, and Events. [23]
Organizing by interest
Reddit’s filing describes volunteer moderators defining communities and keeping conversations on topic. It also describes machine learning for discovering relevant communities and content.
The communities have their own rules within policies set by Reddit itself. [17]
The WWW Virtual Library began at CERN in 1991. Volunteer specialists compiled subject guides, with individual indexes hosted on different servers. [24] Finding useful material was already work people shared across the web, with choices about what to include made by different operators.
Across independently run sites
FORUMPhotography
WEBSITEGardening
MESSAGE BOARDLocal music
Different people or organizations run the websites and set their rules. They can use shared software, and people move between them through links, search, and recommendations.
Within one social network
One company’s tools and rules for the whole service
COMMUNITYPhotography
COMMUNITYGardening
COMMUNITYLocal music
In a social network such as Facebook, the company runs the common system and sets its rules. Members and moderators shape each group within it.
For participants, the practical difference is which decisions they can influence and which depend on the people or company running the site: rules, access, changes to the service, and the ability to leave with their work. Those rights depend on how a service is run, including when it has an independent owner. Supplying community software and controlling the website where a group meets are separate responsibilities.
04 / HOW PLATFORMS GROW
How an online service
becomes
established.
A social network such as Facebook can attract people because it works well, and become more useful as their friends arrive. Someone joining later gains access to relationships that are already there. Choosing that service can be a practical decision about whom they can reach, even when they would prefer different rules or a different use of their data.
Popularity then becomes part of the product. A competing social network has to offer more than useful software: it has to give people a reason to coordinate a move. That makes the size of the existing audience a poor measure of whether its owner offers the best possible terms. The methods and resources used to reach that position matter too.
Where people
already are
In its 2020 study of UK markets, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) described how a social network becomes more valuable when people you want to reach already use it. A large membership helps attract developers and advertisers too. [34]
Resources
to expand
Facebook’s 2012 filing reported $998 million in net proceeds from a January 2011 share offering. It also described infrastructure spending and a growth strategy involving product development, marketing, user acquisition, and partnerships. The opportunity to build and reach people had substantial financial support. [01]
Which service
you encounter
The CMA found that Google paid around £1.2 billion in 2019 to be the default search option on devices and browsers in the UK. Those placements made it harder for rivals to grow. That is one way financial resources affect the alternatives people encounter. [34]
A service offering more control over data could still struggle to attract people whose relationships and archives are established elsewhere. The difficulty also depends on whether existing services let people carry their work or make it available across sites. A small audience would not tell us that its approach was technically incapable or that its terms were less appealing. Continued use of a popular service can likewise reflect the difficulty of leaving.
The opportunity to compete depends in part on the resources available to build, reach people, and keep improving. A community can be worth preserving without producing the returns that attract investment.
05 / SUPPORTING THE WORK
What it takes
to keep a
service going.
Hosting, maintenance, moderation, and improvements take sustained work. A webmaster can cover bills from their own income or contribute unpaid labor, but that support has limits. Members may value a community without being willing or able to cover its costs.
Keeping the service going then depends on finding other support or changing what it offers. Donations, grants, institutional budgets, and commercial income come with different expectations. A donor may want a community to continue; an advertiser is paying to reach potential customers. Who supplies the money affects what the people or organization running it have reasons to prioritize.
Venture capital can finance work before revenue covers its costs, but investors expect their stake to become more valuable. Covering running costs, improving the service, and producing that return are different commitments. Running a community website can be useful and financially sustainable without offering the growth investors seek. When funding depends on that growth, pressure to earn more from participation can become part of running the service.
What happened
to Myspace.
I remember Myspace as a community whose value came from the people using it. Its operation became increasingly tied to revenue commitments, corporate management, and competition with Facebook.
- 2005–2006
News Corp announced its purchase of Intermix, the company that controlled Myspace, in 2005. Myspace was already selling advertising, and News Corp’s announcement presented its community and audience as a commercial opportunity. [35] A 2006 agreement with Google tied minimum payments to traffic and other commitments across Fox sites, including Myspace. [36]
- 2011
Reuters’ 2011 investigation described Myspace struggling to respond to Facebook amid technical problems and management conflict. Former executives said traffic commitments encouraged extra pages and ads, making the site harder to use. They also said management rejected changes that would reduce page views because quarterly revenue targets took priority. [37]
News Corp sold Myspace to Specific Media in June 2011 after reporting falling advertising and search revenue. [35]
- 2012
In a case settled in 2012, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleged that Myspace passed identifiers to advertisers that could connect users to profile information and browsing histories, despite its privacy promises. The complaint details practices during 2009–2011. [38]
- 2013
Myspace was rebuilt and relaunched in 2013 with a focus on creative work and music. [39]
Revenue commitments could make improvements harder to approve just as Myspace needed to compete with Facebook. Its existing audience could not protect it when the product became less useful and people left.
For me, the problem starts when keeping a service useful to its members becomes secondary to increasing what can be earned from them. A community can keep its name and its users while the priorities behind its operation change. The income that helps it survive can also come with conditions that undermine the reason people wanted to use it.
PHOTOBUCKET / 2018When hosting
When hosting
terms change.
An image-hosting company’s decisions can also reach into other people’s sites. In May 2018, Photobucket announced that it had restored hosted images customers lost access to the previous year. Its new management acknowledged mistakes and introduced a cheaper subscription for storage and third-party hosting. People’s ability to keep displaying their pictures elsewhere depended on the terms of a service they did not control. [41]
Serving those pictures cost money even when the discussion and audience were elsewhere. Paid hosting could support that work. Advertising on a host’s own pages can help pay for storage, while a picture displayed elsewhere can incur costs without a visit to those pages. The funding problem included how to keep images available in places that had already been built around them.
06 / DATA AND ADVERTISING
Data collection
and advertising.
Zuckerberg’s 2019 explanation describes Facebook using information about people’s interests to sell targeted advertising. [10] TikTok’s advertising guide likewise offers targeting based on interests and actions such as watching, liking, and sharing videos. [45] Advertisers pay to reach potential customers. That has commercial value even without receiving a copy of the underlying data. Information that helps recommend a creator can also help select an advertisement, but those uses serve different purposes. The ability to discover something worthwhile does not require accepting every commercial use of the activity that led to it.
The FTC’s 2024 staff report found that many of the social media and video-streaming companies it studied had business models that encouraged mass collection for monetization, especially through targeted advertising. [09]
The services examined collected data about users and non-users. People had little or no ability to opt out of their data’s use in automated systems, and some companies did not delete all user data after deletion requests. [09]
People should be able to understand what a service collects, make meaningful choices about its use, and have their decisions respected. A service’s usefulness does not resolve a loss of control, and paying for engineering cannot substitute for honoring a deletion request.
The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.
Scams within
familiar services.
The responsibility extends to what a service sells access to. The web I grew up with had pop-ups, misleading ads, and risky downloads. A useful place could also expose people to harm through the advertising that helped fund it.
That problem persists inside familiar services. In August 2026, the FTC warned that social media platforms do not always thoroughly check ads or advertisers, and that scammers can buy ads impersonating real brands. [29] In these cases, the service is selling distribution for the material that reaches people.
In a February 2026 announcement, Meta described a lawsuit alleging that an advertiser used ads for discounted Longchamp products to lead people into subscription fraud. [30]
- 01 / THE AD
A familiar brand
Ads offered steep discounts for completing a survey.
- 02 / THE REVIEW
Different destinations
The advertiser allegedly showed Meta’s reviewers a different page from the one visitors would see.
- 03 / THE VISIT
A payment request
According to Meta, visitors paid for products they never received and also incurred unauthorized recurring charges.
Meta also described disabling accounts, suspending payment methods, and blocking associated domains. [30] Reviewing advertisers, responding to reports, and helping those harmed belong to the responsibility of selling that distribution.
The need for income does not settle what control people should give up over their information, or what responsibility a provider has for the advertising it distributes. Those are choices about how to fund and operate a service.
07 / CONTINUING DEVELOPMENT
An internet
that kept
developing.
The question I keep coming back to is whether useful services can keep developing under different terms, with room for people to use their work across places they choose. That includes the convenience and creative possibilities of modern photo and video services, as well as communities supported by their members and shared resources others can build on.
Photos, video,
and discovery.
Instagram and TikTok make discovery part of the experience. Meta’s 2023 explanation describes recommendations in Instagram’s Reels and Explore; TikTok’s 2020 account describes a video feed shaped by viewing and other interactions. [43] [44] I can value finding someone’s work that way while questioning what the company running it expects to earn from my participation.
A familiar feed, editing tools, and ways to follow creators could develop under other funding arrangements. The choices would include what recommendations try to achieve, what information the service collects, and how people can share their work beyond it. Those priorities could change while much of the experience remained familiar.
Familiar photo-sharing tools
Pixelfed is photo-sharing software with albums, filters, comments, Stories, and chronological feeds. The project describes itself as ad-free and funded by supporters. These are recognizable photo-sharing features available under different terms. Its software can be used by separately run communities, whose operators still need to support their own services. [46]
Video hosted by different organizations
PeerTube supplies software for video hosting, channels, subscriptions, and streaming. Its developers leave funding methods to the people running the video sites and publishing on them, with support links and options to add other arrangements. The software also supports displaying videos elsewhere and moving an archive to another website running PeerTube. [47]
TikTok also lets videos and creator profiles appear inside other websites through embeds. These displays include links back to TikTok, and a video removed there also becomes unavailable in the embed. [42] The embedded material still depends on TikTok continuing to make it available.
For me, continued development includes making these connections more dependable, alongside paying for hosting, moderation, and improvements. A service’s usefulness includes what it enables people to do elsewhere and how much control they retain when its priorities change.
People maintaining
a shared reference
Volunteer contributors write and maintain articles. The nonprofit that operates Wikipedia receives most of its funding from individual donations and does not rely on advertising revenue. [13]
Donations fund the operation of a shared resource without making advertising its source of income. Funding can be organized around maintaining the resource itself.
A map that can
support other tools
Contributors maintain geographic data that others can copy, adapt, and distribute under its license. [14]
The license gives others a route to use and build on that work. Its continued usefulness does not depend on keeping every application inside the original website.
Publishing separately
from the listening app
A podcast distributed through an RSS feed can be made available to different listening apps. Apple’s own documentation describes this arrangement. [15]
The publisher’s feed gives different apps a way to carry the same work. Commercial services can participate while distribution remains available beyond any one of them.
Paying for a community
Dreamwidth carries another part of that history forward: personal publishing and community discussion. In 2017 its operators described a service financed by paid accounts and shop purchases, with no advertising or sale or rental of users' data. [27] Its published principles continue to commit to operating without third-party advertising. [28]
Paid accounts and donations can support communities and shared information without selling behavioral advertising.
Communication between social websites
ActivityPub, a W3C recommendation published in 2018, specifies communication between independently operated social servers. [11] This addresses communication across providers, as OpenID addresses sign-in across sites. Moving an entire community, its archive, and its relationships requires additional support. Each is a capability that can receive investment.
HOW SERVICES CONNECT
SEPARATELY RUN WEBSITESConnecting
Connecting
separate websites
Separate websites can use shared standards for sign-in or exchanging posts. Moving an archive needs support too. The people and organizations running those sites still decide how to fund them and what rules to set.
The possibility I see in the history of the web includes both familiar services operating on different terms and work shared across different providers. Reliable support could give more of these arrangements a chance to develop, reach people, and remain useful to them.
OK.WTF
It could have
developed
differently.
The tools keep changing, but many of the things we want from them remain familiar: finding people, sharing what we know, and having some say in the places we use. I want to judge progress by how well it serves those needs.
Replacing a physical control with a touchscreen does not, by itself, make the experience better. I think the web deserves the same scrutiny. A service becoming newer, larger, or more profitable tells us little on its own about how well it serves the people using it.
Companies such as Meta and Google made real contributions to the web. That does not establish that their ownership, advertising practices, or restrictions on sharing were necessary for the web to keep improving. Other builders could have pursued different priorities, given resources and an opportunity to reach people. That possibility matters when we judge how these services treat us, where our work can travel, and what we remain free to build.
REFERENCESBack to the beginning ↑
Sources.
Company statements, historical documents, reporting, and examples discussed in the essay.
Checked September 29, 2026. The early interfaces and diagrams are original illustrations.
- 01Facebook S-1 registration statement↑
The mission statement and founder’s letter describe Facebook’s social role. Its growth strategy appears on page 4; pages 57–58 report infrastructure spending and net proceeds from the January 2011 share offering.
- 02About YouTube↑
Source of YouTube’s quoted mission statement.
- 03Google company information↑
Source of Google’s quoted mission statement.
- 04The Things That Connect Us↑
Zuckerberg places Facebook in a longer tradition of tools that connect people.
- 05RFC 821: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol↑
Documents mail transfer and relaying between systems. A historical specification, subsequently superseded.
- 06RFC 977: Network News Transfer Protocol↑
Describes Usenet and specifies distribution, retrieval, and posting of news articles.
- 07World Wide Web project page, preserved in 1992↑
An archived web project page linking documents, people, and software. The date is the archive snapshot.
- 08RFC 1459: Internet Relay Chat Protocol↑
Documents channels, private messages, and relationships between IRC servers. Dated by publication.
- 09FTC staff report on social media and video-streaming data practices↑
The agency’s summary of a 2024 staff report based on responses to orders issued to nine companies in 2020. The findings concern the practices examined in that report.
- 10Understanding Facebook’s Business Model↑
Includes Zuckerberg’s account of what the pre-Facebook internet lacked, followed by his explanation of targeted advertising and Facebook’s denial that it sells people’s data.
- 11ActivityPub↑
A specification for client-to-server interactions and communication between federated social servers.
- 12Licensing the Web↑
Describes the April 30, 1993 public-domain release of the basic web client, server, and shared code library, and subsequent licensing decisions.
- 13Wikimedia Foundation donor FAQ↑
Describes volunteer contributions, the Foundation’s role, funding primarily from individual donations, and its policy against advertising revenue.
- 14OpenStreetMap copyright and license↑
Explains reuse of contributor data under the Open Database License, with attribution and license obligations. Hosted map tiles and APIs have separate conditions.
- 15Distribute your shows to listeners↑
Explains distribution through publisher-hosted RSS feeds, including availability to apps beyond Apple Podcasts. Applies to shows distributed this way.
- 16Twitter S-1 registration statement↑
The letter gives the mission; the Business section describes interest-based targeting using relationships and activity. These passages describe Twitter in 2013.
- 17Reddit S-1 registration statement↑
The mission, advertising discussion, and data-licensing sections describe how Reddit presents and commercializes activity in its communities.
- 18Snap S-1/A registration statement↑
Includes the quoted statement of purpose and a company-reported Target campaign example comparing swipe optimization and effective advertising prices.
- 19Google: Advertising↑
Explains cookies, activity across services and devices, location signals, and ad selection on services including Search and YouTube. Some uses depend on settings.
- 20The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine↑
The Google founders’ paper discusses tensions between advertising incentives and search quality. The paper also describes using the web’s existing link structure in search.
- 21Building a Better News Feed for You↑
Connects the growth in users and posts to information overload and the need for News Feed ranking.
- 22Our First Communities Summit and New Tools For Group Admins↑
Announces the goal of helping a billion people join meaningful communities, with examples of groups and tools for their administrators.
- 23Recommendation Guidelines↑
Describes personalized recommendations for Groups, Pages, and Events, and the company’s rules for recommendation eligibility.
- 24About the WWW Virtual Library↑
Describes the project’s 1991 origins, volunteer subject specialists, and indexes maintained across different servers.
- 25Building Efficient Data Centers with the Open Compute Project↑
Announces publication of hardware designs and facility specifications developed for Facebook's data center, inviting others to use and improve them.
- 26Kubernetes↑
Records the 2014 release, the 2015 contribution to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, its open source license, and its use in Google's cloud service.
- 27Dreamwidth News (and welcome!), 14 April 2017↑
Describes financing through paid accounts and shop purchases, without advertising or selling or renting users' data. This is the operators' account of the service at that date.
- 28Dreamwidth Guiding Principles↑
Sets out commitments on advertising, privacy, access to data, interoperability, and open source. Its About page describes the publishing and community service built from LiveJournal's code.
- 29Are ads on social media vetted or checked for scams? Here’s what to know↑
A consumer warning about advertiser screening and scams purchased as advertising, including brand impersonation.
- 30Meta Takes Legal Action Against Scam Advertisers↑
Describes lawsuits and enforcement against alleged scam advertisers. The Longchamp example summarizes Meta’s allegations about a Vietnam-based advertiser, not a judicial finding.
- 31OpenID Authentication 2.0↑
Describes decentralized authentication, with no central authority required to approve participating sites or identity providers. Cited as evidence of the possibilities being developed at that time.
- 32The OpenID Foundation Launches the OpenID Connect Standard↑
Announces the ratified standard for interoperable sign-in across websites and applications, with implementations by multiple organizations.
- 33Mozilla’s Identity Platform Finalist for Federal Support↑
Sets out goals for Persona and a proposed pilot: user control of personal data, open standards, and multiple identity providers. Documents design aims at that date.
- 34Online platforms and digital advertising: market study final report↑
Summary paragraphs 28–34 discuss social network effects and paid search defaults. The £1.2 billion estimate concerns UK default search payments in 2019. The report recognizes product improvements alongside advantages protecting established firms.
- 35News Corporation to Acquire Intermix Media, Inc.↑
Describes the planned purchase of Intermix, including Myspace, and lists social features and advertising reach. News Corp’s 2011 annual filing records lower advertising and search revenue at Myspace and its June 29 sale to Specific Media.
- 36Fox Interactive Media Enters Into Landmark Agreement with Google Inc.↑
Describes search and advertising arrangements across multiple Fox sites, including Myspace. Minimum revenue-sharing payments were conditional on traffic and other commitments.
- 37How News Corp got lost in Myspace↑
Contemporary reporting based on executive interviews. Describes product and management problems, competition from Facebook, and reported pressure to retain page views and advertising revenue.
- 38In the Matter of Myspace LLC↑
Includes the complaint’s account of identifier sharing during 2009–2011 and the settlement documents. Final approval was announced September 11, 2012.
- 39Myspace Announces Official Launch of New Platform Across Desktop and Mobile↑
Announces a rebuilt service, mobile app, music tools, and a focus on creative communities following the 2011 sale.
- 40Photobucket: image hosting for other sites↑
Describes image hosting and formatting for forums, online stores, blogs, and apps. Supports the external-hosting example; it does not establish identical sharing features or terms for every early media service.
- 41Photobucket Introduces New Management Team and Pricing Plan↑
Acknowledges mistakes, announces restoration of hosted images customers lost access to the previous year, and introduces cheaper paid third-party hosting. The company presents the change as an effort to rebuild trust and sustain its business.
- 42TikTok: Embed Creator Profiles↑
Describes external creator-profile embeds, links back to TikTok, and the effects of privacy settings and removal on embedded content. External display remains dependent on the provider.
- 43How AI Influences What You See on Facebook and Instagram↑
Explains ranking and recommendations, including Instagram Reels and Explore, and describes controls for influencing recommendations or selecting a chronological feed.
- 44How TikTok recommends videos #ForYou↑
Explains the For You feed using interactions, video information, and other signals. The regional page is dated October 26 and identifies the explanation as June 19, 2020. Describes the company’s stated design at that time.
- 45TikTok: A guide to targeted advertising↑
Describes interest and behavior targeting, including watching, liking, sharing, and following creators. Advertising selection is distinguished from content recommendation in the essay.
- 46Pixelfed: photo sharing and project support↑
Lists albums, filters, comments, Stories, chronological feeds, and separately operated servers. Describes an ad-free project funded by supporters. Those commitments do not establish the funding or practices of every server.
- 47PeerTube: features, hosting, and funding choices↑
Describes publishing, streaming, external display, archive export and import, and software that leaves content funding methods to its users. PeerTube is software run by different providers, each responsible for its own operation.
- 48DeviantArt: Share Links↑
Describes sharing art through external sites including LiveJournal and MySpace, with credit and links back. Artists could enable or disable sharing links or restrict viewing to members. These were specific sharing options, not unrestricted permission to reuse artwork.