15 Jul 2026 Search

correction: The original version of this said that Sun required users to pay for “the compiler that they used to get with the OS.” That’s not right. The unbundling happened at the same time as a release of a new version of the compiler. The compiler version that was licensed separately from the OS was not a version that had previously been bundled.

previously: A BATNA for MyTerms

Looking back at the history of the IT industry, it’s possible to find instances where vendors did to their customers some of the same kinds of shenanigans that oligopoly companies are doing to everyone today.

An early example of paleoenshittification was the decision by Sun Microsystems to remove the C compiler from its Solaris operating system (see p. 24 of this July 1992 PDF) An OS, as a two-sided platform for developers and users, is in a position to do the enshittification cycle, and Sun did it early. The Unix software scene was the subject of an enshittification run long before artists and writers experienced one on Facebook. Sun tried to get people to pay to rebuild their own C programs long before Meta tried the same for reaching people’s own audience. Yes, many Solaris users started paying for the compiler, but others were able to slip out of being caught in first-stage enshittification—maybe because old-school Solaris didn’t have the infrastructure, licensing, or anticircumvention law to lock out or put a toll on other compilers. The removal of this key development tool was one of the key events in the popularization of a copyleft-licensed replacement, gcc, and the rest of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Project. More info in Nick Moffitt’s $7 History of Unix.

Without that move by Sun, and other attempts at enshittification of Unix, the software freedom movement and open source software business might never have gone mainstream. So for those who dig rhyming history, it’s tempting to make the analogy: MyTerms and the tools that support it are to the enshittifying web of today as the GNU licenses and tools were to Unix. But the rhyme needs to hang together. The GNU tools were initially distributed first on tape, then CD, in a convenient form for building and installing on existing Unix systems. The Autotools that mystify the developers of today were a pragmatic response to the need to work with what’s there in order to get adoption.

Today, IEEE, IAB, and W3C are all trying to address similar problems with how personal information gets used on the web, and everybody has gaps. The winning approach will be the one that can best embrace, extend, and ameliorate where necessary, the other two.

That starts with understanding the territory.

MyTerms is not unique in offering an automated way to do the paperwork necessary for processing personal data. On a technical level, data collection on typical web sites operates not directly under control of the site ToS, but using an Interactive Advertising Bureau standard called GPP, which stands for Global Privacy Protocol. (Not to be confused with GPC or GPL.)

GPP is an existing machine-readable way—with open source documentation and sample code—for browsers to tell sites that

  • the user in in a jurisdiction that requires consent, and consent has been obtained

  • the user is in a jurisdiction that recognizes opt-outs, and no opt-out is in effect

  • the user is in some other jurisdiction, do as thou wilt shall be the whole of the law

And all of those options can apply to a bewildering grid of purposes and vendors.

Although MyTerms relies on contract instead of consent, it solves a problem that from the company point of view is already solved. Companies that process your data already have machine-readable permissions that they rely on to process your data, because they already check GPP.

From the company point of view, there is zero reason to check MyTerms for permission to do something that GPP already says is allowed.

So the path to adoption for MyTerms has to account for the widespread existing reliance on GPP. MyTerms can de-enshittify your web experience, but can’t get adopted everywhere all at once, any more than C programmers could go from proprietary Unix to a complete “GNU System” of all freely licensed software all at once.

We have to look for key influence points to work with what’s already there.

Fortunately—because GPP is open source, along with a bunch of handy tools for working with it, it will be pretty straightforward for MyTerms implementations to also support GPP.

Detect sites where GPP is in effect and modify any consent or no-objection entries that are obviously in conflict with the MyTerms contracts that the user is willing to accept. This means a little extra work is required to map the MyTerms licenses to the permissions that can be expressed in GPP, but when that’s done, a new MyTerms user can start getting value from their MyTerms tool even on non-MyTerms sites.

That would leave the MyTerms/GPP hybrid providing more privacy protection than GPP as deployed today, but not delivering the full benefits of MyTerms—kind of like how installing GNU tools on Solaris solved the immediate problem of building C programs, but you still needed a licensed copy of Solaris to run them. But it gets the MyTerms situation from (stable, no MyTerms) to (unstable, some MyTerms) on the way to the full MyTerms stack. For sites, the decision to adopt MyTerms would go from no effect to a better option than just MyTerms to GPP (lossy) encoding. And users could get a similar immediate benefit to what Rewarded Interest offers—the confusing, annoying “consent” dialogs disappear.

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