intertwingly

Danny Sullivan: My own view is that trying to come up with some type of universal guidelines for content modification tools isn’t going to be successful. I think there’s going to be a variety of lines that we draw over time, and those lines might even change over time. But for me, right now, adding links is a clear and simple line we can start with. If you make a tool that adds links to a page, you should give the publisher an ability to override that feature.

Danny is right about the first part.  As to the latter part, open source changes the dynamics.

Thought experiment: build an open source version of the code with an opt-out feature.  Now, imagine a “fork” of the code which does not include this “feature”.

Which one will users pick?

Ken MacLeod fleshes out this hypothetical conversation further.