Videoconferencing
What is the problem?
One of the things people enjoy the most about the internet, is that it enables them to talk to others remotely almost without limit. Internet allows anyone to keep closely connected with friends and family, and help their kids solve a math problem while they are at work. People collaborate with their colleagues from the couch of their living room, the cafe where they enjoy lunch or on their cell phone on the bus to the gym. Businesses can easily service their customers where this is most convenient to them, without having to travel themselves. This is so convenient, that some businesses have already moved entirely online. Internet communication has become the nerve center of whole neighbourhoods, where people watch over the possessions of their neighbours while these are away for work or leisure. Videoconferencing has become a mainstay of our digital toolbox since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic forced our hand almost overnight. We made the leap, and it stuck. Meanwhile billions of group video calls are made every day.
The benefits are obvious, but so is the cost - not just in terms of economic cost, but also taking into account privacy and security. The biometric information from camera’s and microphones ends up with AI-driven companies, without much scrutiny. The tools most widely used are typically tied to a limited set of platforms and lack robustness, resuling in a loss of resilience and agency. It is fair to say we currently have a real-time dependency on a small amount of proprietary services, often operated by foreign actors with a known problematic track record. Dependency on such proprietary tools poses significant operational risks for organisations and people, not to mention the high price tag. This means as a society we should ot rely on them in times of emergency or political turmoil.
Video conferencing isn’t rocket science, and web browser based solutions provide a drop-in solution for pretty much every practical scenario. Open tools also speed up innovation and allows us to benefit from some of the best minds of the world working on creating new tools and improve integration with the rest of our digital toolbox.
Dominant proprietary actors
- Cisco WebEx
- Discord
- Google Meet
- Microsoft Teams/Skype
- Slack
- Zoom
Libre alternatives from our portfolio
Policy recommendations
- Install libre alternatives everywhere as immediate fallback
- Invest in further development of open alternatives, add any functionality you need
- Investigate what dependencies are in place that hinder migration away from legacy solutions
- Enforce existing legislation and policies on use of standards in the public sector
- Make sure educational institutions are on board and have high quality open educational resources to avoid future generations from ending up here
For most use cases, a switch can be made today. Ambitions should be bigger: this is dealing with how we communicate with each other at scale, which is a core aspect of our society and economy.
Furthermore, current solutions disadvantage people with disabilities. By developing privacy-friendly, accessible and efficient videoconferencing tools that can be deployed ubiquitously, we make society more inclusive and broaden the opportunities for people with disabilities on the job market in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
This is too strategic to leave to a few very large commercial actors. Even by allocating a small percentage of the budget spent on proprietary services annually today, we can broaden this and spark more productivity at lower cost using digital commons. Currently, there is no such dedicated investment to be found anywhere, apart from the ability for such projects to get small grants from generic open calls via NLnet within the Next Generation Internet initiative. Taking political responsibility means having a structured longer term approach: we know that this need is here to stay, and by embracing the collective need we can remove the liability that is insecure proprietary video conferencing and make our economy and society function better.
