Apple’s assault on advertising and Google
calacanis.com
calacanis.com
What the fuck. I am so sick of seeing this absurd and obviously false idea repeated. Did a cabal of content producers hire Frank Luntz to redefine basic English words for them?
I thought this issue was settled years ago, when this same argument was been made (and rejected) back when Tivo came out.
"Anything you do that interferes with my shitty business model is stealing." Whatever you say, Jason.
however, the Ad blocking companies are a bit of a fraud, as they're blocking ads then allowing certain advertisers to buy their way back in! Like an extortion racket.
However, you should read the whole piece, because I do clearly put in there that it's folks right to do what they want on their desktops/mobile phones.
The issue really is the overall approach of apple saying "we're going to impose our distaste for advertising on the world by not only enabling, but endorsing/encouraging this stuff."
It's certainly a juicy topic for discussion.
I agree. This is so blatantly shady that I can't believe people actually do it.
> It's certainly a juicy topic for discussion.
I'll agree with that too.
Your ability to get rich is not my ethical concern.
Anyway one particular aspect I thought was pretty silly:
> IS IT MORAL FOR APPLE TO BLOCK ADS? > It’s your device, so you can do whatever you want with it. When you download something onto your device, it is now yours to remix and play with in any way you want – provided you don’t republish it and make money from it.
That's like saying it's moral to download the free trial of adobe, and then modify it so it doesn't shut off access to the software after 30 days or call home or require payment, because hey it's your device and you can do whatever. It's ridiculous reasoning. Obviously the whole morality of adblocking isn't black and white, but at the end of the day, when a content-creator makes something and is willing to share it with you for free on a single condition which is that you keep the ads intact, you're either supposed to accept that, or reject the content. Taking the free content and rejecting the condition of the ads isn't simply completely fine because it happens to have landed on a device you own. There are plenty of well known arguments for and against that are reasonable, this isn't one of them. If you actually already paid for the content (like in the NYT example he follows up the above quote) then sure, you can do whatever, that's the principle behind gamers wanting a right to mod their games for personal.
> willing to share it with you for free on a single condition which is that you keep the ads intact
It's very easy to detect ad-blocker usage (ad-blockers do nothing to mask their presence) and prevent the ad-blocking users from getting your content. No content provider does this. They instead choose to serve you the content anyway. There is no "condition" attached; they are choosing to hand you the newspaper, knowing you're holding the scissors.
If 1. content providers started refusing to serve content to ad-blocker users, and then 2. ad-blockers made themselves undetectable to skirt this, then yes, you could say the users were doing something "mean." Probably mean to about the same level as using Google to skirt the NYT paywall.
I've seen quite a few that detect Adblock and ask you to turn it off (the OK ones) and the ones that prevent content being viewed (the not-so-nice ones).
In fact, the removal of these nag messages from Adblock-detectors has it's own list:
https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/antiadblockfilter...
I would not feel it is ethical to do this, as the software was sold with the intention of 30 days. Just like the newspaper was sold with the intention of 1 day.
In that case you're giving an example of buying a newspaper, which is now yours and you choose to modify it any way you want, to show ad blockers are morally justified, despite the fact the vast majority of ad-blocked ads (probably easily 99%+) are on content that you didn't buy and received on the expectation (whether this condition is explicitly stated in the TOS or implied, it's expected) that ads aren't removed which you ignore, thereby taking content for free and making sure the content creator isn't rewarded.
It's a silly comparison to when you actually buy a newspaper, pay for it, reward a content creator and then decide to modify it any way you want.
You're comparing one situation where you reward a content creator to one where you don't, and then say they're moral equivalents, it's ridiculous.
You're clearly aware of the discrepancy in publishers getting rewarded as you later talk about how Google will be crushed and publishers will switch to charging money.
What would be desirable is really hard to say... I guess perhaps it's to have an ad-driven web with pay-2-block everywhere. I use an ad blocker currently (which I don't think is morally justified but do anyway out of convenience and egotism), but I'd be happy to pay content creators to simply block ads, without immediately having to tie into their ecosystem, register for their website, start a relationship with every little website I happen upon, fill in payment details and subscribe for an entire year or pay a ridiculous 1-day or 1-article premium etc. While at the same time for many years, mostly during my childhood, I've been served hundreds of thousands of ads for which I never could've paid, either due to lack of money or lack of payment options. I love the notion anyone can jump on the web and access the world's information, whether you're a poor kid in the US or Nigeria or Vietnam, or an 80 year old who just wants to visit the nyt to read the news without having to set up an account. These people are still valuable, perhaps less so, but that value is found on a dynamic market of advertisers rather than expressed in a subscription pricing scheme that makes no sense for them.
Is it moral for Apple to enable people to block ads on the web but not block ads in Apps such as Apple News?
This isn't to say that the open web is dead is dead, but I'm seeing it turn into a backwater. Also what I'm not crazy about is that unlike the old days of packaged software where there were several distribution networks, it feels to me in the US that there are maybe only two app stores that have any merit. And keep in mind that back in the day you didn't need Microsoft's permission to make a title. So this walled garden feels even more closed than what I use to see in the 90s.
I'd say the only people who should fret is porn sites. Most people who browse porn on their mobile devices will probably be the first to jump on these, because those are really awful.
Mind explaining this further?
It is also the most used app on the mobile devices by a large margin; http://marketingland.com/facebook-most-used-mobile-app-googl...
[Primary sources seem to be behind paywall)
There is a large group of users whose first internet connected device is a smartphone, so Facebook has an cultural grip on the net that seems unassailable. Facebook still hasn't figured out how to capitalize on that besides forcing businesses to shell out to reach the userbase, but if they do, Google have a lot to worry about.
My original comment was an oversimplification though; The big G is still the largest contributor to referrals to specific info, like ecommerce listings and scholar texts.
Apple's attempt at information services have been stillborn till now. Maps does not work in most of the world and Siri might as well be the world's most racist digital assistant since it can't understand any accents in English. The additions in iOS9 seems well integrated, but I have to test them in my other home on the other side of the world, where Apple does not have a significant market share. I don't think Apple takes this section of their business all that seriously.
This will change if more of the above begin using browsers leveraging SFSafariViewController. Obviously I doubt anything embedding Chrome will ever benefit from iOS content blocking.
Ironically I use Firefox on my Android phone, because you can use extensions...such as adblock :)
Hey Calcanis, get over it, it's just business.
So, I'm fine with Google killing off their partners, from yelp to mahalo, and my editorial is not anti-Google.
the facts are the facts... Apple is trying to kill Google. google is go buck wild ramming ads down people's throat.
it's an awesome, huge battle
That is ridiculous. Stealing is taking what is not given. Stealing is not the lack of taking what is given.
We really are in an era of redefining words to mean whatever suits you. Everybody seems to be doing it!
Trying to force us back to the days of the AOL-style walled garden is bad for everyone. The fact the OP hasn't figured that out is a clear sign he is out of touch.
I mean, they are targeting everyone for extinction, from Yelp to content sites to comparison shopping. They used partnerships to build their business... literally meeting with all of us startups 10+ years ago and saying "let's win together!" and then they double crossed all of us, studied our traffic and moved us 600 pixels down the page.
Its a great lesson for folks: never build your business inside of someone else's.... unless you have a really good idea of how you can pull and Aliens-like move and eat the host!
At some point in time, Google will face a serious problem, because Google is an ad company. Every service they provide is aimed at serving ads.
That's about 3 steps too many for the vast majority of people.
But I agree, there's no real network effect going on, none of the major browsers will integrate it.
I think the early apps that allowed you to e.g. turn on your camera's light as a flashlight, early calculators etc are probably indicative of how popular these adblockers may get, but those were still pretty damn ubiquitous, not Whatsapp level growth but if you add up all the different apps that did this... it's up there. And we shouldn't underestimate the power of a better internet experience, I still remember when I first got Firefox and then later Chrome, looking back IE was just insanely bad and those two browsers ate up a ton of market share really quickly without any real network effects (although Chrome obviously had a lot of power behind it and even Firefox was marketed pretty aggressively).
Bit by bit, iOS and Apple is eroding away the free and open nature of the web. Almost every app that I have seen on the AppStore are merely consumers and senders of JSON to a REST API that could have easily been implemented as a HTML5 web app.
If you followed a link to some content, then it's on the web – even if the native application that is rendering it isn't called a general-purpose web browser, and even if a general-purpose web browser can't render that content.
There is no dichotomy between native applications and the web. HTML document in a web browser -> Link -> JSON document in a native app -> Link -> HTML document ina web browser is one unbroken chain of surfing the web. Deep links in iOS 9 just make this a more seamless experience than before, and they do it in a way that is more compatible with non-native applications. Before, you had to mess about with application-specific schemes. Now you can do it with standard HTTP URIs that can be useful to non-iOS devices as well.
If you prefer an HTML document rendered in Mobile Safari to a JSON document rendered in a different iOS application, then you can argue that, but you aren't arguing for the web over the non-web – you're arguing for a single generic document viewer over specialised ones. In both cases, you are using a native iOS application to view a remote document that you followed a link to.
That's fine, but not a particularly useful definition (you could just refer to "all data formats that have a program that can display them") and it completely misses the worries of the GP around "the free and open nature of the web".
I'm not redefining anything, I'm correcting a (very common) misconception. This is how Tim Berners-Lee defines the Web, and how it's described by the W3C.
I know this is not how you are used to thinking about the web, but that is how it is defined by its creator and its governing standards body.
> all excel documents because they can be linked to on a web page
If you put an Excel document on a website, is it not on the Web?
> Which means the web is really all digitized information and can never be harmed because it's just a Deep Link away.
You're putting words in my mouth – I didn't say that.
> That's fine, but not a particularly useful definition
It is; this definition isn't nearly as all-encompassing as you appear to assume. It excludes many types of native application, and it also excludes lots of things that are commonly referred to as web content. For instance, content that you can find by clicking through an SPA but is not otherwise addressable shouldn't really be thought of as on the web, even if you can find a way to make it appear in a browser. If it's not addressable, it's not on the web.
> it completely misses the worries of the GP around "the free and open nature of the web".
I'm not missing them, I'm clarifying the context. This really isn't about whether it's on the web or not and arguments going down that path are missing the point.
However, I see the Internet as a superset of the web. The internet includes VOIP, video streaming and apps. A large part of it is not consumable via HTTP through a browser.
Just because it runs on port 80/443 doesn't mean it's the web. I'd say you need to be able to consume it on a browser to be part of the web.
Once upon a time, JPEG images didn't open inline in a web browser. When you linked to a JPEG document, it would open in another application. They were resources that you could link to on websites, but browsers couldn't render them directly.
Were those JPEGs on websites not really on the Web? Did the first browser to implement an inline JPEG renderer suddenly add all JPEGs with URIs onto the Web?
Browsers don't define what's on the Web. What's on the Web is defined by links.
This is as important as all that other stuff. If only one proprietary implementation/app can access a set of links, it doesn't matter that they are standard HTTP URIs that serve standard JSON or whatever. They might as well be links to CompuServe or eWorld resources, at that point.
That isn't always the case, but it is sometimes the case (and is sometimes enforced with some kind of token or other mechanism to prevent access by "unauthorized" client apps). I would argue that those cases are fundamentally different from "the web".
> Apple draws the line at stealing content, and doesn’t see the subversion of ads as stealing – which all of us in the real world know it is. Undermining a publisher’s ability to monetize is stealing, but it’s Robin-Hood, feel-good stealing.
This is wrong on so many levels. The ad model relies on the honor system. Yes, the honor system. You are served content and it's expected-no, trusted-that whatever you view the content inside will download and show you ads. This business model made sense initially because there was no other way to get people to pay for content on a network that is based around standards versus vendor lock-in when little to no e-commerce was happening or really even possible.
As ads became worse and started to require clients download sometimes MORE data than the content they are viewing it's only natural the users would fight back against such shitty behavior. This was written about and predicted over 10 years ago and I'm honestly surprised it has taken so long before people began complaining about it. I remember when some of the first ad blockers became popular and many websites were writing about how this was stealing, the internet was going to die, blah blah blah.
Markets change when technology disrupts the status quo. Online advertisement through resource-hogging third-party ads has been the status quo and it has been eroding for quite some time. Why do you think Google makes ads look more and more like search results? Why do you think so many sites are doing "fake content" that's basically an ad disguised as content? People realize that the ad of the early 2000s just isn't going to cut it anymore.
Calling it theft when you give it away for free is asinine. Adapt or get out.
Personally I don't feel that browsing the web where every site is like "if you want to read this on iOS use our app because otherwise we can't make money" is going to be a better experience for users. Or you might think sites won't do that but if they can't make money they'll go out of business. So again, users lose.
Also the web, or at least ad supported sites, will go away if they can no longer make money. Given that more people browse the web through phones than PC and that difference is growing, blocking so many ads could easily be the end of many websites that are living off ads. Some examples of such sites. Arstechnica, Tom's Hardware, Slashdot, Boingboing, Polygon, ...
There was a post here a few days about Apple advocating for CISA or some other act (not American, I don't remember the exact act) and how Apple is amongst those pushing to want to share data.
There is no doubt about it the way Google has managed to entrench itself is disgusting - Google Analytics is so common and that alone lets Google correlate your viewing habits to your user account.
I realised this a while back and have been browsing with SafeScript and 3rd party cookies off. The web is still surprisingly useful.
Just need to wean myself off Gmail... But I don't see that happening any time soon.