Here’s a fragment from the Q&A in Europe’s ‘Blockchains for Social Good’ Finalist’s Day. Frank van Dalen, partner in WordProof, answers a question on adoption: “why would tech giants adopt it?”. This post transcribes his answer, including links to relevant sources.
Why would tech giants adopt WordProof’s Timestamp Ecosystem?
Actually, it’s really a challenging question. Why would tech giants take our stuff? And let’s not be naive; they won’t, I mean:
- They make money out of fake news;
- They make money out of fraudulent advertisements.
They want to do it their way because they’re centralized bodies.
The Role of Regulation
We as an open-source community really have to push them into the right direction. Luckily for us, we have a lot of help from the European Union with legislation coming in, directives coming in, but still what we see on a daily basis is that those tech giants are lobbying, saying “what you’re asking is something we cannot do. You ask us to distinguish fake from real news, but how would we know? If someone tells me something about Africa or Asia, how do I know what is real and what is not real?”
This is where at timestamps come in, but timestamps as such will not be a solution either. Because where does it come from? Do we have the right tier level in place to actually know who gave it and that this individual or the organization is legit?
Tier Levels and Social Media
But how do we deal with a legit organization that is still spreading out fake news? We see that in politics happening all day long. This is where the consumer comes in and needs to be able to say like, “listen, I don’t want to see anything from this organization, even though it’s in tier level seven. I know who it is. I don’t want to see it.”
And Facebook, and other tech giants, should be able to say: “Everything below tier level three, it will be published as we are not about censorship. It will be published, but will not get distribution beyond your own list of friends.
Search Engines and Timestamps
And when it comes to Google, the search engines, how does Google know who really owns the stuff? So, what we are working on is [integration in] Schema.org. That we actually provide tools in the [search engine’s] language to fulfill their promises, to create a secure internet. Because that’s also what they promise.
Relevant: A Word on SEO, Structured Data & Content Timestamps with Blockchain
Decrease Advertising Fraud with Blockchain Timestamps and Identity
So, and about fraud. We’ve seen all those advertisements about buying Bitcoins and we are talking to people from [large media companies], where the CEO is constantly showing up in those Bitcoin fraudulent advertisements.
This is where that multi-tier level comes in, where the model in the advertisement, the advertisement agency, and the commercial is timestamped. Because only when we get created triangle, we will have a really sustainable mechanism to say like, “this is legit and this is not”.
So well, they don’t automatically [adopt], probably not. But we’ll provide them the tools to actually do so. And we’ll tell the European union they can just continue with the legislation because there are answers, even though the big [tech giants] are saying there are not.
Relevant links: