What if businesses agreed to customers’ terms and conditions?

With standard, simple and friendly terms of our own, we can simplify how we deal with every business, for their good as well as ours—and get our

In the Industrial Age we had no choice but to agree to the terms and conditions of every large company we dealt with. That’s because becoming large required standard form contracts that allowed companies to have one kind of agreement with many customers. Without those contracts, companies couldn’t (as they say in Silicon Valley) scale.

But we have the Internet now: a world of nothing but ends, each by design no more privileged than any other. Archimedes said “Give me a place to stand and a lever long enough and I can move the world.” The Internet gives each of us that place. In other words, a way to get scale:

Here are just a few of the things we can do with that scale:

1. Proffer our own terms, as first parties, when dealing with companies. (Every time you click “accept” to some company’s terms, you’re the second party. And the subordinate one.) We can also express global (or one-off) preferences and privacy policies, in ways every entity we deal with can hear and respect.
2. Change personal profile information (name, address, whatever) for every company we deal with, in one move (rather than going to countless sites separately, logging in and making changes there)
3. Have our own standard ways to share data about the things we own or use, and to provide the companies whose stuff we own with useful intelligence about how we use them—and how they can improve them.
4. Intentcast our interest in buying or renting anything, without exposing more personal data than required to get deals done (and with contractual restrictions on the use of personal data—see #1 above).

Standardizing those things will have enormous benefits for companies as well as customers, because companies won’t be burdened (as they are now) with creating (or hiring) their own different and silo’d ways of “relating” to customers, of “delivering an experience” to them, and of locking them into one-sided legal non-agreements that aren’t much good for anybody.

We already have the place our own first party terms can live: Customer Commons, a nonprofit created to play the same role for personal terms that Creative Commons plays for copyrights.

And now is the time, because of this:

GDPR is the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union. Interest in it is hockey-sticking because after 25 May 2018 companies can be fined up to 4% of their global annual revenues for violating it. (And the EU already fired a warning shot with with its $2.7 billion antitrust ruling against Google.)

The GDPR, says its full title, addresses “protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data…” Translation: the GDPR outlaws what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. Think about what that will do to the one-sided rule of surveillance capitalists. And then think of what new business practices and opportunities will arise when customers get leverage.

That’s the challenge we face right now on our side: the individual’s side.

The first business we can save from the GDPR is advertising-supported publishers. And we can do it with a term called #NoStalking:

With #NoStalking, we proffer a term that says —

While protecting our privacy, #NoStalking does all these things for advertisers and the publishers they support:

1. It relieves them of the need to have their third parties track us like animals everywhere we go, harvesting personal data we’d rather not give anybody without our permission.
2. Because of #1, it gives them compliance with the GDPR.
3. It provides simple and straightforward “brand safety” directly from human beings, rather than relying on an industry granfalloon to do the same.
4. It lets good publishers sell advertising to brands that want to sponsor journalism rather than chase eyeballs to the cheapest, shittiest sites.
5. It provides a valuable economic signal from demand to supply in the open marketplace — one that will serve as a model for other terms that are just as good for all concerned

All we need now is help hammering out the technical particulars, and growing Customer Commons itself. If you’re up for that, talk to me. (I’m my first name @ my last name dot com.)

An earlier version of this post appeared at Customer Commons on 26 April 2017.