Problem statement

Motivation in our society comes from the competitive instinct: get ahead, get rich, get recognition. However, success comes by means of cooperation. The rich, the famous, the well-known belong to networks of cooperating individuals. The top competitor is not the individual but the clique or network with the best contact list, the best strategy, and the best combination of resources. As intelligent people we need to explain how it can be that competition is the motivation but cooperation the means to success. Secondly, as citizens of a very dangerous world, we want to know how our society can survive and prosper competing with other societies.

That's a big agenda but WWN is focused on just one part - the Internet.

Current Internet methods do not foster cooperation on vital matters. Yes, there are blogs about social life and politics and fantastic on-line information resources. But where vital interests are concerned - national security, medical situations and treatments, financial dealings - mistrust rules. We are plugging into the web as are our doctors, our government and our security forces. But we have yet to realize the Internet's potential to increase our society's health, security, and well-being. For many matters, we will only trust friends, families, college friends, and contracts negotiated face-to-face.

Technology-oriented commentary on the Internet blames people for the failure of the Internet to intrude on traditional methods. That is a narrow perspective. People are actually exhibiting a wisdom based on millions of years of social interaction. We should distrust the Internet. Our species learned to recognize a bad deal 100 generations ago. There is something wrong with the Internet and we need to squarely face the problem to move ahead.

That brings us back to the first problem outlined above - how is it that cooperation is the success factor in a world based on individual competition? That question was answered brilliantly by an analysis by Dr. Robert Axelrod that we discuss in the next section. Our instincts are actually correct. Ground-breaking social research explained this phenomena in the years the Internet was just getting off the ground.

Briefly the answer is that cooperation is a highly effective competitive strategy. People who adopt a pattern of cooperation succeed against people who adopt alternatives like pure competition and hierarchical control. Under the proper conditions, cooperation evolves in a competitive landscape, drives out unproductive competition, and everybody wins. Under poor conditions, competition reduces the society to subsistence level economic conditions and political subservience to a foreign society with a better way of doing business.

We want to take Axelrod's idea in the direction of using the Internet to foster cooperation and ensure a prosperous, secure society. WWN is designed to take the Internet to that next level. It will take a few steps to explain the WWN design. First, we need to discuss the research on cooperation, then look at the successful strategies, next look at how the current Internet undermines and prevents a successful strategy and finally explain how WWN fixes the problems with the Internet. That is a tall order, so please bear with us.

Research on Cooperation

Cooperation was studied and understood before the Internet revolution. University of Michigan Political Science Professor Robert Axelrod propelled the subject into public discussion with the publication of his book The Evolution of Cooperation (1984). This work provides the social engineering context for WWN.

In his study, Axelrod and his collaborators showed that humans — and indeed most social animals — exhibit an ability to cooperate with others as a means to maximize self-interest. The study explained how this cooperation arises spontaneously when conditions are right even when there is also an institutional structure. Explanations aside, the most surprising observation in the study, for many people, was the volume of evidence to show that voluntary elective, cooperation is essential within government, corporations and even military units even though those organizations are theoretically based on formal, legal obligations. Organizations whose structure and culture foster natural social cooperation tend to succeed while those that cobble it fail.

Axelrod's notion of the Evolution of Cooperation is the product of both experiments and historical analysis. Reducing the historical patterns to idealized game-theoretical strategies, Axelrod showed that successful strategies follow closely a simple, idealized strategy called tit-for-tat. Tit-for-tat advises competitors to cooperate at first and then take the cue for their next action from how the other player acted on the previous move. The strategy is cooperative because cooperation is the default decision, but the strategy is also principled because it looks out for self-interest. A player using principled cooperation will not continue cooperation if the other player fails to respond in kind. Lastly, the strategy is forgiving because it reciprocates cooperation in the present moment and forgets past transgressions.

Prof. Axelrod's argument considers a multitude of issues and draws on many lines of evidence. Only the broad conclusions can be given here. The game evolves successful patterns of cooperation when several assumptions are true:

1. the players interact often and expect to remain players indefinitely,
2. the players know each other or can at least attribute actions to the responsible agent reliably, and finally
3. each interaction is brief and less consequential than the sum of repeated actions.

Axelrod's analysis showed that not only are these conditions necessary for tit-for-tat to succeed, they are also essential conditions for all voluntary cooperation. For a detailed analysis, the reader should turn to Axelrod's book or any of the subsequent studies. The three assumptions are enough to explain the limitations of established technology and the value of the new approach applied in WWN.

Critique of Integrated Information Networks

Let us consider today's attempts at cooperative activity on the Internet in the context of the three assumptions required for principled cooperation.

Current procedures leave servers accessible to individuals with no confirmed identity. It is difficult to attribute information, requests, or orders to a fixed identity; thus, the second assumption is violated.

WWN addresses the identity problem with digital IDs — that is not an novel idea of course — but it adds another important change. Interactions take place with the aid of a broker. Over time, people can develop trust with an intermediary — for example a Google or E-bay — and that trust may alleviate some of the fears of dealing with less well-known parties.

The largest obstacle by far to successful widespread integration of information via the Internet is the violation of the third principle of cooperation: The risk from each interaction should be bounded and small. In contrast, a large open, database is exposed to serious exploitation with potentially grievous consequences. Consequently, the most important databases are closed and private. The people who guard such data do not cooperate; in fact, it may be illegal for them to do so.

The advantages of WWN

The goal of WWN is to protect most of an agent's information resources from misuse. Sharing is based on small quantities of information that are exchanged for a specific reason. Although there remains some risk, it is controlled. The parties involved have verifiable identities so that future cooperation can be extended or withheld based on the past behavior of the other party. Finally, the used of an extended series of small, discriminating interactions as opposed to large-scale, broadly-inclusive sharing agreements creates a long-term mutual interest in the relationship that helps prevent one side or the other from exploiting the relationship.