Launching the W3C Community Group for Browser Data Portability

• Browser Data Portability Community Group

Thanks, that's quite an introduction from Bruce and from Alex. I think I feel like I have to wind back the clock a little bit now before I start. I was at the CMA and we were scoping out a potential market study into something to do with mobile. It was that early. And I was convinced that we needed to look at the whole picture and look at what we decided to call mobile ecosystems.

And there was a prevailing view in the organization that I wish, interestingly, we should just focus on app stores, 'cause that's the most interesting thing. That's where all the problems are. And actually then I kind of stumbled across something Alex had written. Something I think like Hobson's Choice or something. And it absolutely gripped me. And that was, I kind of just battered everyone into submission that we needed to work on that.

And then I got this mysterious email from somebody called Matthew Thomas. But he also admitted that that wasn't his real name.

And he wanted to talk to me about browsers. And it all came from there really. And it was a wild ride and it was good fun. And I think collectively we made some really big strides there. So anyway, I kind of have moved on and evidently I kind of haven't as well. So 'cause here I am, right? So anyway, I'm Director of Policy for the Data Transfer Initiative.

We're a nonprofit that focuses on enabling people to move their data between services, which is called data portability, but we make the mission long and wordy. So yeah, we're not just a think tank. We're not just a kind of lobby group. We don't just kind of moan about stuff. We've got engineers that maintain and steward the code base of the data transfer project, which is a photo and music playlist transfer tools.

We step in and intervene and try and solve real world problems and participate in the kind of portability ecosystem. And we get involved in kind of policy debates and engage with the commission and the CMA and all the same folks that OA engage with. So anyway, a while back, I was about to have a conversation with Kush from Mozilla. So it's the fact that the speakers tonight have lined up perfectly.

And I was trying to think of a way to get him interested in my work. And I had a light bulb. Well, data portability is relevant for browsers. So anyway, we had a conversation, it was great. And then I kind of, I went down into the rabbit hole because I realized it was a great opportunity for me to kind of bring together the two things I'm really passionate about. One being making the browser market work well and the other being data portability.

So I jumped down into that rabbit hole and I've popped up here somehow. And I'm very pleased to be here. So Alex did a brilliant job of, both Alexes in fact, did a brilliant job of explaining this slide. So I'm not gonna cover it other than just say, I agree with everything that they said about why browser competition is important for protecting the web.

And if we agree that competition is good, then we also agree that barriers to competition are bad. And it seems to me that the browser markets has a uniquely long list of potential ways that competition can be blocked. And they're kind of competition folk, kind of group them into two buckets. There's supply side barriers to competition, which are things that make it harder for a company and organization to bring their product to market, sort of unencumbered and able to compete on a level playing field.

And then there are demand side barriers to competition, things that prevent ordinary people from making free choices and actually having those choices respected.

In the context of browsers, yeah, I tend to think about these things as sort of links in the chain. We can, through all of this work with regulators and policymakers and engaging with companies directly, potentially address a whole heap of these problems. But if we leave one behind, if we have one link in the chain that breaks, the user journey, the competition journey fails. There's no point going on doing all this work on browser engines and making sure browsers have access to the right hardware and software and APIs.

If then users can't freely switch or their choices aren't respected and they get bunked back to the browser they were in the first place. So we really do need to make sure that somebody's working on all of these different things. So I'm gonna try and work on a very small bit of this. So if you're kind of familiar, obviously, with the concept of trying to switch products, services, devices, in the context of browsers, I think the ability to move your personal data with you is becoming increasingly important because our experiences and our uses of browsers are becoming increasingly personalized.

Browsers utilize our history, our search and click and browsing history to kind of speed things up for us. We have our tabs, our bookmarks, our favorites, which help us organize our browser and make the experience kind of more efficient.

The browser remembers our address and helps us fill out forms. It remembers our credit card information, our passwords, obviously, if we want it to. And for me, this is just a lifeline. I'd be constantly running downstairs, getting my credit card, debit card information. I'd be clicking "forgot my password" every single time I had to log into anything. So for me, if I can't move all that information with me to a new browser, I don't think I can face it.

So I think it's really critical. And it's kind of a weird situation where across all of the different myriad of devices and operating systems and ecosystems and browsers, the solutions available and the processes in place is just such a random patchwork and it's such a mess. And it isn't really, it hasn't been, it's quite different from some of the issues that have been talked about so far where there's this, I guess, a sort of implication that there's been a sort of deliberate kind of changing of things over time.

The way browser data portability works feels much less calculated, it's just a bit messy. Things used to work pretty well on desktop, but it's a bit of a hack and it's kind of getting a bit worse over time and even now it's different depending on which laptop you're using. Mobile is terrible, but perhaps, which is a familiar story, of course, but perhaps actually uniquely as a result of some of the progress that's been made from the Digital Markets Act in particular,

Safari and Chrome might be up towards the better end of having solutions. They're still kind of being tested and I don't think anyone knows quite how useful they are yet but they've been forced to ship something to them that worked for mobile. So there's just a whole heap of gaps and all of the different processes are different. There's different data included into each different solution and it's a bit of a mess.

I think that the thing that for me, couple of things for me that make me feel optimistic that I can try and fix this problem without having to go complaining to regulators or antitrust or anything like that is firstly, unlike many of the things in this chain are about market power and our big tech problems and quite rightly they require kind of asymmetric competition regulation to solve. Every user of every browser should be able to take their data with them.

It's not a big tech issue, it's an everyone issue. So firstly, I don't think it needs to be an adversarial thing because I think all browsers, assuming that they've got a decent team of engineers, should be thinking about how to fix this problem. Secondly, I think there's really a great capacity for consensus because look, every single browser vendor feels the same. We want to import data and we don't want to export data. It's a pretty good starting point for building consensus that everyone feels the same way.

So anyway, my plan is to try and bring the sector together. Browser implementers, kind of web enthusiasts, policy people, crazy people, whoever. If you're interested, I want to bring the sector together to talk about what does good look like from the user perspective when you transfer your data between browsers as part of a switching journey. In principle, like how should it work? What sort of data should be included and what are the safety and security requirements and guardrails needed?

And I started talking to people about, that's me, by the way, not Steven Gerard, I'm a former footballer. I started talking to people about how I had this grand plan of bringing everyone together and everyone was gonna agree and we're gonna fix everything. And some well-learned people would advise me that there's this thing called the W3C and they've got really good ways of building consensus about how to fix things for the web.

So what I did decide was instead of reinventing the wheel, I would just set up a W3C community group and hopefully bring together a decent kind of group of people that want to have some good conversations. The aim is to build towards a report that sets out some high-level principles for what good looks like. And then hopefully in time, that influences browser behavior and development plans. So here are your actions.

Please do, if these issues feel important to you, please join the group. It's a bit lonely. There's five of us in there so far. I think we're gonna have some really good conversations. My demands for members will be extremely low. I just need an hour of your time every now and again, once every month or two, and I will do all of the heavy lifting. I just need you to come along with your brain and good humour.