Persona-summary

ITA white paper executive summary -- April 16, 2011

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

An emerging Attention Age – characterized by an economy which treats human attention as a scarce and valuable asset -- is transforming the information business and raising significant public concerns about an escalation of intrusive, privacy-challenging marketing. For the institutions that practice journalism, this represents a chance to survive beyond the era of mass-market advertising, by becoming “information valets” for their readers, viewers and users. Trust, access, identity and value are core issues, affecting convenience, privacy and personalization. This attention economy invites new collaboration among news, advertising, publishing, entertainment, technology and philanthropic services. Yet to survive in the Attention Age, news organizations --- legacy and new networks – must:

· Offer a convenient, trustworthy, personalized service for individuals to find and transact for information vital to their daily lives. The value should be given or received, depending upon whether the individual needs the information or a marketer needs to reach the individual.

· Allow content providers full flexibility to continue to operate closed, proprietary, “siloed” systems for their own users.

· Create and participate in a new openly governed system for consumers to go outside their chosen “silo” to connect and exchange value with other content with identity and privacy under consumer control. (See: Four-Party model)

Background and recommendations

In less than a decade, we have moved from a world of relative information scarcity -- access restricted by a variety of technical choke points -- such as presses -- to a world of information abundance. Thus the average user's challenge is not how to access information, or even how find it, but how to sift, personalize, trust and make sense of it.

Managing information overload is an opportunity. It creates new businesses for agents that help the public with trust, identity, privacy, personalization and information commerce. This paper suggests how publishers can cultivate customized, one-to-one relationships with users, provide them personalized information, and get paid for doing so. The next newsroom will originate news, aggregate news from others and deliver this to individuals based on their unique persona – based on their unique combination of age, sex, race, income and education, their values, attitudes, interests, lifestyles and their physical location on earth.

Google or PayPal handle commerce, but not elements of identity beyond what’s necessary to get paid. Facebook is moving to handle identity, but might not be trusted for commerce, and faces looming regulatory scrutiny because of its dominance. None of these players have a connection to civic information or journalism. Each might migrate services into news or information aggregation, identity management or payments. A trust, identity and information commerce framework would allow them -- and legacy news organizations -- to do so across a common playing field where consumer privacy is respected, business rules are transparent and the consumer can easily move among competing options.

To establish a neutral framework for doing so, this paper calls for creation of a public-benefit initiative, an Information Trust Association (ITA), by publishers, broadcasters, technology companies, account managers and related trade groups. It should recognize in its non-equity governance structure the interests of at least four parties: (1) end users, (2) rights-holders and publishers (including authors, artists, information providers and aggregators), (3) neutral authenticators, loggers and aggregators of transactions (the ITA or its contractors) and (4) information agents, or “infovalets” -- account managers (banks, telcos, publishers, billers etc.) whose primary allegiance is to the user. Whether as a new entity or a initiative of an existing public-benefit organization, a clear institutional leader must emerge to lead, convene and launch the ITA.

The ITA initiave could:

· Contract with or license with one or more for-profit entities, funded by investors, to operate elements of the shared-user network for trust, identity and information commerce. The network should be compliant with and supportive of all existing Internet protocols. · Vest greater choice, control and economic value of their privacy and personal information in the hands of individual citizens. · Simplify the open, competitive exchange of value among users and information suppliers. · Guarantee one-account, one-ID, one-bill simplicity from any of multiple participating trust/identity/commerce providers (“InfoValets”). · Assure the trustworthiness, and neutrality of enabling technologies. · Operate transparently within existing antitrust law to provide a platform for competition which benefits the public. · Establish voluntary privacy, trust and identity standards · Research, test and commission key technologies · Sanction protocols for sharing users and content · Foster and govern multisite user authentication service · Support webwide tracking and billing for “atomized” content

The Internet infrastructure as we know it today is not up to these tasks. With the ITA, it can be. o