Sidewalks are an amazing feature of our cities that we take for granted. They are available 24/7. We step on them at any crosswalk or when leaving any shop. We don’t need a ticket or anyone’s permission. Sidewalks are open and free.
As with all things taken for granted, we appreciate them when we lose them. You walk from one neighborhood with sidewalks to another without sidewalks, and you feel like somebody stole your walking medium under your feet. Your trottoir rights! I personally experienced it in some small towns in Europe or in the suburbs of big cities, especially in the Balkans (notably in rich suburbs). And not only in the suburbs of big cities, but sometimes also in their centers. The first such experience I remember was in Palermo: narrow streets with car traffic without sidewalks. Scary.
Sidewalks are free protocols. They are open, and other free protocols work on top of them. First protocol: sidewalks are for pedestrians, not for cars. Common with protocols, it becomes visible only when broken. And then plenty of other protocols work over a sidewalk: shoulders negotiating collision avoidance, greeting protocols, queuing. Free protocols work on top of other free protocols and form free coordination stacks.
Until the stack is captured with a layer owned by somebody.
The inserted layer on a sidewalk can be a restaurant terrace. A great layer for those using it. Not so for the squeezed passers-by, suffering reduced trottoir rights.
So the air above the sidewalk is for everyone to use until somebody inserts another layer of coordination, claiming the air and, with it, capturing the whole coordination stack.
At the beginning of the previous century, William J. Wilgus, chief engineer of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad, realized air rights could be sold. It began with building a platform (was that the birth of platform economics?) above the rail yards. Then a way bigger and more profitable step: replacing the Grand Central Terminal with a 50-story tower.
There are sufficient similarities to justify borrowing air rights for the technodynamics framework. But there is one important difference. Air rights are granted by the landowner. A protocol commons has no owner, so the right goes to whoever builds on top first. That rights claimer can then sell the air right above the inserted layer, with which the whole stack is captured, the way Amazon sets the technofeudal regime that the merchants using the platform operate on.
Air rights are the claim over a stack’s coordination, held by whoever builds a layer in the space above an open layer.
The claim, when it forms, can be exercised or unexercised.
The exercised claim is one way, and maybe the most popular way, of creating coordination control.
The queuing protocol is open, but inserting a layer of priority boarding captures the whole coordination stack. Facebook added a layer on top of the free HTTP protocol, claimed a huge share of the web, and built an extractive platform on top of it. GitHub claimed the air on top of the Git protocol by inserting a layer of collaboration and automation.
These are all examples of exercised air rights claims, but they have different impacts on the participants. Priority boarding is just a paid protocol on top of the free one. Coordination rent is extracted, but little harm is done to the participants, and their capacity is not reduced. Such a reduction can be done by GitHub, so a much stronger coordination control, but so far it hasn’t been abused. And then at the far end of the spectrum, we have Facebook, one of the world leaders in concentration crimes.
Similar cases abound, but it will suffice to give only two more examples.
The audit layer inserted over the double-entry booking protocol created a concentration of control in the Big Four, so that in 2022, they captured 99.7% of the S&P 500 audit fees.
The rules of football (US: soccer) are free. Any eleven people may play without asking anyone. But FIFA claimed the air rights, holding fixtures, eligibility, registration, and ranking. FIFA captured the stack and keeps scoring high on corruption.
So, for an exercised claim, we have three variables: coordination rent (extracted from participants), capacity (taken from participants on exit), and burden (what others, participants or not, bear).
Before going to the unexercised claim, let’s clarify that air rights are not necessarily something held by an agent. They can also provide an architecture description. The majority of corporate IT worldwide is built with an application-centric mindset. I explained why and how that happens in Apps Break Data. Since the functional scope determines the data “scoop,” information becomes hostage to the system that holds its interpretation. In other words, applications hold the air rights over data.
The unexercised claim is such that it has only potential. It doesn’t extract rent, reduce participants' capacity on exit, or burden them in any way. But it’s there. The inserted layer is in use and may be claimed at any time. Take Bluesky as an example.
The company Bluesky runs an app over an open protocol, currently used by close to fifty million users. It has inserted a Discover feed, which it fully controls. There is no coordination rent extracted, and, thanks to the open protocol, users can exit ,taking everything with them: identity, social graph, and posts. But the inserted layer of Discover, held by Bluesky, represents an unexercised air rights claim. Not abused so far, but can be, at any moment (remember Twitter?).
And so GitHub holds the air rights of git (well encoded in the name), Facebook took the air rights over HTTP, FIFA holds the air rights over the rules of the game, corporate apps hold the air rights over data so the data is locked and fragmented, and Bluesky holds the air rrightsfor the users of the app, a claim that is not yet unexercised.
In all cases where air rights are exercised, the open layer continues to work below. HTTP continues to work across platforms, while Amazon and Facebook extract rent from users in various ways, reducing their capacity and increasing their burden. Double-entry bookkeeping works the same way as an accounting protocol as it did before the air above it was claimed by the auditors. And the trains keep running below Grand Central, while the towers above collect the rent.
When a restaurant gets the right to use part of the sidewalk as a terrace, it doesn’t get it for free, unlike the platforms. It has to apply, get permission from the local government, and pay per square meter. The rent is paid by users of the inserted layer, while the burden is borne by users of the free layer. The city charges for what the restaurateur gains but not for what the pedestrian loses. Just as priority boarding makes the free queue worse for those who do not pay, the restaurant terrace makes it worse for pedestrians who are not restaurant patrons.