nOne – An Overview - 042026



Look at the 2 nOne Nails above-right. Click on them. See what they do. This is the visual nOne. 

nOne is the first subjective layer of the Internet. 

The vision of nOne is to mirror within the digital realm with what we currently have in the social realm. All social interactions come from a base of permissions and consent, whether this is implicit or explicit. We stick out our hand to shake the hand of another, and all this is implicitly governed by permissions and consent. Action must respect permission. In fact, it is not a stretch to say that activities within the social realm which do not respect permissions are illegal. We must have an equal system of respect within the digital realm. 

However, this is not how our existing digital realm operates. Currently, it is the engines/platforms/algorithms which hold ownership over us, held captive by the 8-screen EULA. AI Crawlers use our content/IP for training, platforms contain behavioural automation to keep us captive and increasingly… indoctrinated. This is analogous to having society reign supreme over our permissions. This cannot continue. We must reverse this. This is nOne, where the permissions we require come with us as we traverse through the digital realm, causing the machines to pause, listen to our permissions, and respect us.

Now you may say that this is a daunting task... considering we have taken 800 years since the Magna Carta to somewhat safeguard respect within the social realm. But the cracks are very evident now which will facilitate the evolution of nOne:
  • The Fair Use Gamble: AI companies like OpenAI argue that training is “transformative” meaning they aren't just copying code, but using it to teach a model how to "understand" logic. However, the U.S. Copyright Office recently released a report stating that commercial scraping of expressive works for competing products likely "goes beyond established fair use boundaries",
  • The Fair Use Decision: in Thomson Reuters v. Ross, in the first AI fair use decision, the court rejected the fair use defence in the context of AI training data,
  • The Licensing "Paper Trail": Some AI companies have reportedly stopped keeping internal records of exactly what data they scraped to avoid creating a "smoking gun" for future discovery in court. They often use the phrase "publicly available" as a legal shield, even though "publicly available" does not mean "free to use for profit",
  • Active Litigation: The case Doe v. GitHub is currently testing these theories. While some direct copyright claims were initially dismissed, the court allowed claims regarding breach of contract and violations of open-source licenses (like MIT or GPL) to proceed,
  • The "GitHub" Bug: A major legal problem is that AI engines sometimes "regurgitate" verbatim snippets of code, including original license headers or proprietary secrets. If a tool like GitHub Copilot suggests 50 lines of code that are identical to a private repo, the "transformative" argument collapses into a standard copyright violation,
  • Financial Catastrophe: The stakes are high enough to bankrupt these companies. For instance, the New York Times vs OpenAI seeks damages that could reach $1.5 trillion if "wilful infringement" is found, far exceeding the company's entire valuation,
  • “Social Media” bans: Australia is the first nation to ban social media for children, which shows the backlash against the power of their behavioural algorithms. But should this be up to the governments to restrict individual access, or should this be a function of the people themselves.
While these legal actions may not result in judgements against AI providers, they do signal dark clouds on the horizon, and a growing resistance to the access power of AI. The point is, I believe that the AI providers will recognise that the architecture behind nOne is a fait accompli, and required within society not only to benefit the users of their services, but themselves as well.

At this time, nOne is comprised of 2 elements:
  • Nails: Currently there are 3 Nails (email, AI/LLM, Cognitive Input (what is presented to you)). They are the visual nOne proclaiming to the world that you want respect within the digital realm.  So, an AI Crawler spots your blog-post which outlines your working theory of intergalactic travel, sees that an AI/LLM nOne Nail is on the page, clicks on the Nail, and understands that this page is not to be used for their training.
  • .none files: These are the machine nOne. They are machine-readable files (take a look) which contain your permissions, and sit there awaiting the machines. So, a social media provider, upon sign-up, can download your .none file and understand exactly how you want their service to act.


What this image depicts is what the end-goal of nOne is… Nails driven into the digital ground everywhere, on blog-posts, web-pages, PDFs, Email signature... forming the framework of permissions which must be respected by the machines.

What nOne provides simplifies what are otherwise complicated issues within the digital realm. For example, the ethical framework of AI can now be whittled down to:

AI must respect the permission of others


...or possibly more apt:


Permission is the condition of AI


nOne is functional now. The machines have not been compelled to respect your nOne permissions as of yet, but what comes first is the proliferation of Nails driven into the digital ground, signalling that you want respect and this is what that looks like.

So go to https://network1.site, sign up, and start adding your Nails into the digital ground.

Eric Handbury
M: +61 417 116 425
E: ehandbury@activeclearing.net                                    

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