Just enforce the Hyperlink

Disclaimer: This post will ignore AI and MCP. Mainly because I don’t believe it’s going to be as big as the companies desperately searching for a business model claim. And if it does they should still be forced to adhere to the proposed law.

The hyperlink might be one of the most important inventions of modern times because it makes providing context and further information much more accessible than it ever was. It’s no secret that hardly anyone actually ever clicks on them but just image how many orders of magnitude worse the statistic has to be for references that have to be looked up by hand.

Even so: The potential that 1 % of readers would leave their site or platform scares companies to death. The result is that fewer and fewer external links are happening across the internet. Google keeps more traffic for itself than it ever did and while publishers rightly call out the blatant theft that’s currently happening, their own editorial policies do the exact same thing.

The solution is right there: Regulation. And it’s not like this is a new proposal that unfairly burdens anyone. Rules about how to properly quote other people’s work have been the basis of publishing for decades. The US has Fair Use, Germany’s version is called Zitatrecht. The law has always recognized that creative works need some kind of protection.

While this isn’t an endorsement of the exact implementation of current copyright law, it’s the one we have and could just amend to include the reality we currently live in. There is no valid reason to not link to things you are referencing and just to close the loophole right now: No it won’t be allowed to cite the printed article when it’s also available online at the time of publication.

This small change in how to legally quote and cite sources would also have large ripple effects that could lead to more competition in social platforms. Because if you (or at least a creator generating enough income to make the requirement reasonable) have to link to the things you are talking about, the logical conclusion is that the Instagrams and TikToks of the world have to be legally required to not just make linking out of their walled gardens possible but also that they wouldn’t be allowed to downrank posts for containing links.

I get why they currently do. All incentive structures are currently built around time spent on the apps and – this might be a leap, but I do think it’s related – they all saw how Instagram used the openness of Twitter’s API back in the day to rapidly grow their platform to the behemoth it currently is. While a social graph is not the same as links, it’s a signal how being open to the outside world could be tool for competitors to gain traction on your product.

But even in capitalist logic competition is good and we need to enforce it. It’s why links are the tool of choice for regulating the App Store. If you recognize the power of the hyperlink there is only one logical next step: Enforce it everywhere. The only ones who’ll experience downsides are big corporations and grifters who purposefully misquote people for disinformation or engagement purposes. Good riddance to them.