Sealed well

The image is precise. A well is a public resource and sealing it does not remove the water, it removes the access, so the information remains public in principle while a private party controls who reaches it and on what terms. Nothing needs to be hidden for the operation to work, which is what distinguishes it from censorship. This is an interception point in the sense the civilization entry gives, a place where something that would otherwise pass between two parties has to go through a third who can take a cut, and the cut here is attention, data or payment rather than money directly. It is the same structure as the sealed platform, the app-mediated public record and the aggregated dataset licensed back to the people it was gathered from. Marsh's interest in it is practical rather than only critical, since radical transparency requires that organizations and actions affecting the public be fully knowable, and a sealed well breaks that requirement without appearing to. Her work on trust networks and reputation came out of building a prototype for Getgee, a project initiated as the Global Square, which was an attempt at the alternative. The remedy the framework implies is structural. Transparency has to allow anyone from any part of a system to be as informed as they wish by any other part, and information sharing has to be driven by the information rather than by whoever owns the route to it.

Enclosure of the information commons is a well developed critique, with James Boyle describing a second enclosure movement and Lawrence Lessig writing on the shrinking public domain. Open data and open access campaigns address the same problem in government records and scholarly publishing, where paywalled research funded publicly is the standard example. Platform studies examines how intermediaries capture access to material they did not create. Marsh's term is narrower and more vivid than any of these, naming specifically the case where the information is already public and only the access has been privatized, which is the version hardest to argue against because nothing appears to have been taken.