The legality of Apomediation
Tl;dr
What is Apomediation?
Introduction
Apomediation is […] a socio-technological term that characterizes the process of disintermediation (intermediaries are middlemen or “gatekeeper” […]), whereby the former intermediaries are functionally replaced by apomediaries […].
The term was first coined around eight years ago by Dr. Gunther Eysenbach, a Health Policy and eHealth professor at the University of Toronto. Applying the concept to the way consumers might increasingly find medical information and discover health-related services in the future, Eysenbach defined the nature and function of ‘apomediaries’ with the following words:
The difference between an intermediary and an apomediary is that an intermediary stands “in between” (latin: inter- means “in between”) the consumer and information/service, i.e. is absolutely necessary to get a specific information/service. In contrast, apomediation means that there are agents (people, tools) which “stand by” (latin: apo- means separate, detached, away from) to guide a consumer to high quality information/services/experiences, without being a prerequisite to obtain that information/service in the first place.
Can Eysenbach’s definition be leveraged to describe what has been dubbed ‘the decentralized web‘?
Today, in face of recent developments around the concept of smart contracts in conjunction with distributed systems that are essentially able to virtualize an entire server, we can attempt to give a more general definition to the concept.
A smart contract that is hosted in a decentralized execution environment such as the bitcoin blockchain and other, even more powerful blockchains,
Exported from Medium on January 3, 2025.