Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
– Milton Friedman
The Knuckleheads’ Club was founded by Zack Maril in 2020. It’s a nights-and-weekends project of his that he has informally been working on in private since the fall of 2018. The club was publicly opened up for membership December 2020 along with the publishing of an article about this research in The New York Times, “Google Dominates Thanks to an Unrivaled View of the Web”. The reason why it is called the Knuckleheads’ Club is because only a bunch of knuckleheads would try and take on Google. We spend our nights and weekends writing and researching policy as a way to imagine a better world, and a better internet, yet to come. We’re just a bunch of random, stubborn people on the internet trying to make something happen together. We want to see the fruits of the information revolution truly benefit everyone, not just the people who got there first. And you’re invited to join us.
The best way to contact us is via email at [email protected]. If you are a regulator looking for a briefing on web crawling, please send an email to that address and we can coordinate further.