Comcast-Funded Civil Rights Groups Claim Low-Income People Want Ads Over Privacy
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
We need to think of the internet as a public utility. How absurd would it be if every time you used water in your home, you heard an advertisement playing from a speaker in the faucet.
It's a very important point; this false argument is often used. In truth, in the marketplace, goods are not priced at 'cost-plus'; i.e., they aren't priced by taking the cost to the vendor and adding a profit margin.
Goods are priced at the point that will maximize profit for the vendor; economists would say at the point that maximizes marginal profit. Colloquially, they charge as much as they can.
The fact that the vendor has another stream of income from Product B doesn't cause them to reduce their prices for Product A. Microsoft doesn't cut the price of Windows because they are making so much from Office.
Republicans argue for "free-market solutions" which are actually government granted or encouraged monopolies where no competition exists.
There lots of examples of free market capitalism making the world a better place and markets failing as well. There are examples government run services providing great consistent services and there are examples of government bureaucracies soaking up budget and graft in their own or lobbyists interest.
Which tool do you think will work best in this situation and why? How do you plan to deal with the inherent problems of government involvement in ISP regulation?
I'm just tired of "free market solves all" vs "corporation are evil, government is universal solution". We learn nothing and convince no one.
Microsoft did cut the price of Windows to get people to adopt it early on because they would be making so much money from Office.
Microsoft Word vs. WordPerfect, Excel vs. Quattro Pro and Lotus 1-2-3. These battles were won because of Windows and that cemented their position as industry leader.
Now that Microsoft is in a dominant position they don't cut the price of Windows as much, but to remain on top they do give the OEMs a very sweet per-unit deal they really can't refuse.
If that's true (and that's not my understanding) they did it to gain marketshare and maximize profit, not because they already had enough profit. In that scenario, they cut the price of Windows to make even more from Office.
EDIT: Perhaps more importantly, dynamic priceing could be more efficient than a regime in which you can use huge amounts of water at a low fixed cost, and then suddenly none when it runs out.
Right, and the point of a water ration is to ensure that everybody limits their water use to some prescribed amount.
What you and the OP are describing is arguably a bug, not a feature.
The point of contention here is not of price economics per se, but of politics. At issue is whether or not one should be able to circumvent a ration by virtue of his monetary resources. Some people (including myself) find this notion distasteful.
It shouldn't be this way. It serves no purpose. You first claim that everybody has access to resource X at a reasonable price (because we don't want to discriminate against poor people), then when resource X starts to run out, they enforce bans instead of charging more to people willing to pay a premium (and getting the resource first) and then using it to expand production and access to everyone.
This story plays out everywhere, whether in Soviet Russia or in California or in NHS.
Same with Internet. Back in the days I had a plan like that, where Internet would be faster and wouldn't count towards your quota if used in the night. All the heavy downloads would be scheduled to run overnight
Almost certainly.
Take all the content available to a cable subscriber, and the money that goes into producing that content. Take out the ads and split the bill (in addition to the relatively low costs of operating/maintaining the cable company itself) among the subscribers. That's just covering costs; now add a bit of profit to motivate those companies to stay in business.
There's no question you'd be paying more - a lot more. We just don't think the ads are saving us money because we don't know any different - that's just the way TV has been since the beginning.
Those poor people will pay one way or another. Given the indirectness and inefficiency involved in the advertising approach, I wager they'll pay more that way. And it'll be less fair: people with less willpower will pay more.
Advertising makes sense when direct payment is impractical. Broadcast TV is the classic example. It's really hard to charge money for it, so ads let you indirectly collect money from your viewers. On the internet, paywalls are practical technologically, but tend to add too much friction, so we get ads instead. But there's no reason for it here.
Second, lets imagine that poor people would prefer whipping instead of imprisonment (they can return to work sooner) or fine.
Should we follow the same logic here then and accept it?
Being poor is not a crime.
Say, instead of fine 50, I may agree to accept 5 whips with a wooden stick on my back. Because I need these 50.
So should we accept whipping the poor if they demand it?
I would argue that violation of the online privacy is worse than whipping. No, the problem is not that somebody knows what specific content you are watching. The problem is that they find out you are poor.
Youtube once considered that I could be a stereotypic poor person living in the US. The result was ugly.
Yeah, but internet advertising fetishizes "personalization" and quantitative metrics, which are predicated on invasions of privacy. Advertisers could put those toys down, and go back to more traditional, privacy-preserving advertising, but I don't think they have the maturity and willpower to do so on their own.
It's not working very well. How much more data do they need to collect before it starts working?
When you see an ad that's too tailored most people just get scared anyway.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
I've seen relevant ads beside search results on Google, but that doesn't really take a lot of magic to figure out that when I search for "Aeropress", I'm interested in coffee.
Ads in podcasts have been somewhat effective as well. I use Blue Apron, I like Audible, I've checked out Squarespace, I bought a Casper dog bed. AFAIK, none of the podcasts know anything about me, but they do know generally who their audience is.
And even with all that, the most of the targeted ads aren't any more compelling than content-based "spray and pay."
IMHO, targeted ads are pointless unless they're a targeted to a search query.
Mozilla attempted this on the Firefox home page. Nobody understood the point (partly Mozilla's fault for poor messaging) and it was roundly criticized for putting advertising in the browser, instead of providing a solution to funding websites without violating privacy.
Can be done... rates would have to go down below TV to work and even so will be attractive only for big advertizers (think billions in sales).. Smaller advertisers would have no interest in the medium without targeting
Are we going to see where - if you run such software - suddenly you can't browse any sites, or you can only browse very slowly?
Or will running ad-blocking software be considered illegal or something - because you're depriving potential profit from somebody?
Will ads slowly take over the entire experience? To the point where you just don't want to use the internet any longer (or at least the web)?
Will people move back to gopher and ftp (oh, we can only hope)? BBSs? Door games and MUDs to the rescue?
My wife and I have considered moving to a more rural area of our state - we're both tired of the city and of people in general. I've lamented about how out in such areas, internet service would be spotty or non-existent, but you know what?
Maybe that's a good thing, ultimately. If I need internet for some reason, I'll just mosey into town, send an email or two, then mosey back home.
These advertisers, their enablers, ISPs, and the corrupt political machine that supports it all? They can go f--- themselves.
And quite frankly, for a of people, they're probably right. Especially because people don't understand what they are giving up, because it somehow has to do with "computers" and are therefore different from real life.
If, however you were to explain to a person, that this would be the same as his landlord knowing every single step he took in his home, when he took that step, what he was listening to when he took the step, who he was taking the step with, exactly how he looked when he took the step and use it to shoe advertising, he would cry foul and he would understand that this was not a small thing.
No one complained about this.
So now the idea is privacy is a commodity to be purchased, and freedom from ads is a commodity to be purchased. It's every man for himself, that leads to more distrust, less cooperation, and more acrimony and I think it's incompatible with a civil society. This classist variety of Republican/conservative/capitalist - whatever label to put on it - is vile. It's neo-aristocracy, and it's anti-democratic.
Why can't we have Ads vs. Privacy? Income for Comcast can come from either at the cost of serving ads OR at the cost of privacy--not both. What the fuck?
Regardless, the end payment is the same, it's just a question about how you want to pay.
Edit: For those who think this may be a money grab, remember that the government is getting tax revenue out of the profits ISPs make from monetizing your data. While the ethics of this are debatable, the alternative is zero additional government revenue. So the ethics of privacy need to be weighed against the ethics of providing programs for communities that could be beneficial.
As for the gov't getting tax revenue from selling the information, that's just unpersuasive. First, it's an incredibly indirect way of getting the revenue, and second that could be used to justify any profit-making activity, which makes it meaningless.