The missing status code

The internet reserved a code for money. Why wasn’t there one for truth?

402, payment required

In the 1997 Internet Official Protocol Standards, the documents that specify how the web works, you can find entry 402: “payment required.”

As Matthew Leising tells it in Out of the Ether, it would have created a field on a web page for the type of digital money you’d be paying with. Digital payments embedded into the DNA of web pages, right alongside graphics and text. Yet for many reasons, it never happened.

Reserved for future use

In the detailed part of the standards, entry 402 gets a harsh dose of reality: “This code is reserved for future use.”

There was a placeholder for digital currency. Why wasn’t there one for truth? Evidence? Sources?

Nobody owns them

Protocols are the fundamentals that drove the worldwide adoption of the internet. TCP/IP, FTP, HTML: these building blocks let us interface with each other, and build all the apps we use today.

What’s curious about these protocols is that they’re free. Nobody owns them, nobody profits from their use, nobody has to reveal their identity and hand over their browsing history to use them.

Imagine a world where these protocols are managed by centralised state actors, or greedy CEOs. Do you think the internet would still be free? I doubt it.

It’s not money

We think the single most influential unit in the modern world is money, currency, bitcoin. It’s not. It’s information.

Politicians use it to control our narratives and persuade our votes.

Advertisers use it to persuade us to buy more. Lawyers use it to direct the rule of law.

Bankers use it to loan us money, and charge us fees. Blockchains use it to build the ledgers that transact your coins.

Whatever goes, goes

In science and academia, those making assertions bear the burden of providing sufficient evidence. That principle stops endless resources being wasted on unsubstantiated claims.

Online, these rules don’t seem to apply. Whatever goes, goes, most of the time without proper evidence. Claims made by authoritative figures catch on quickly.

That’s a huge issue, because it creates an environment that isn’t truth-seeking. And whenever an environment isn’t optimised towards truth, it’s optimised towards serving interests.

Who bears the burden?

So whose responsibility is it to provide evidence for a claim, especially when it’s dubious or controversial? And if it’s the author’s, how are we supposed to keep them accountable?

It can’t be the platforms, ruling with force, with bans. That would be too Orwellian.

You own your words

The WELL, one of the early online communities, had a principle: “You Own Your Own Words.” You could use a pseudonym, but you registered with your real name, and everything you’d posted sat in a public archive.

The slogan is powerful because it creates a sense of responsibility. It hints that misusing your freedom comes back to you.

Radically open and practically uncensored wouldn’t work today. There have to be constraints, and principles the community upholds itself. The principles create the environment, and the environment attracts the people.

A trust-based business

We must be able to trust the information we use and pass on, to make decisions and ultimately control our lives. It’s a trust-based business, and there’s a widespread lack of exactly that: trust.

The validity of a piece of information is often verifiable through its origin. But verification costs too much: a million pieces of misinformation cost 3.5 USD to generate and 280k USD to verify, using people.

Protocols can become the building blocks of freedom, if they remain open and accessible, for others to expand and build upon. We can become the solution, as a collective.

It has to be us, you and me.

First written in April 2025.