Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business
theverge.com
theverge.com
This turns out is bad for:
- the user for getting subpar Internet access with a fixed conditions and no option.
- the user since they loose all privacy.
- the content companies who now have to compete with someone in an power position who has abused of that power before.
Arguably (because of FB) Google has a big monopoly on Advertising, but the solution is not to go thermonuclear on the other side!
Oligopoly may be a natural state for last-mile high-speed Internet service. I believe Sweden has avoided this in high population density areas with ISP access to city provided FTTH. In low population density areas it seems really difficult to avoid a monopoly or oligopoly situation.
However, I think other factors are to blame for the privacy issues: Primarily, public ownership of corporate stock, which has caused a focus shift from the value of the provided product or service to maximizing short-term returns. This was the driving force between the telecom providers claiming to be enhanced services (so they can do nasty things), when they had formerly aggressively claimed to be common carriers (because they didn't want to be liable for the content of customer traffic). The state PUCs have also been asleep at the wheel while the telcos used sleight-of-hand to recategorize tariffed services as non-tariffed.
Another factor may simply be the state of computer networking as a mass-market, consumer product and the ensuing race to the bottom.
Australia has done this on a national scale. There is now a government owned network which the existing providers were forced to sell their networks into. The ISPs then compete for services over the top of this network.
The idea is that eventually the national network is also privatized but constrained into being a dumb pipe by regulation.
This model has some problems - for ex. it has prevented some genuine innovation in providing broadband, but there are many benefits to accepting that internet infrastructure is a natural monopoly.
Until the conservatives got into power it was going to advance broadband considerably. Now it's just a multibillion dollar gift to their political mates.
20 years from now when we still have slow internet I'm still going to be telling everyone it's the Liberal parties fault.
This is true, in some cases there will be a duopoly where Verizon FIOS might exist but that's it. The really unforgivable part about all this is that these local monopolies uses public right aways to lay their cable that allows them to deliver service at all. This is because local governments must approve their charter to operate there. These local governments are bought and sold by these monopolies/duopolies the same way Washington is bought and sold by them.
But maybe now this will give a new reason to boost TOR-like anonymity tools. If millions of people participated in such networks, then they would be much faster.
VPNs could suffer from the same problem as ISPs - how can we be sure they are not selling customer data?
The recent privacy rule changes for USA ISPs has me a bit worried. Enough so that I'm shopping around for a low cost, low power consumption, dual-NIC Linux box for making my own firewall.
For the VPN, there are a lot of providers, and switching among them is much easier than switching ISPs. I could also rent a small instance to run my own.
Mainly because many rabid privacy freaks use VPNs, and spreading news about VPNs that pwn users is a blood sport.
Also, I don't understand why people trust random VPN's with all the data, if it's not https then it's all there to be seen or what?
That's why you want to avoid free VPNs. Established VPNs have valuable reputations to protect. And about trust. When you use a VPN, you're trusting it as much as you'd otherwise trust your ISP. The point is, you use a VPN when you can't trust your ISP.
Who would describe the US data provider industry as free market? Bureaucracy is bureaucracy, whether corporate or government.
Decentralized infrastructure for commerce allows individuals to compete with corporations on a level playing field. In other words, Uber for Everything on Ethereum. You will know this has happened whenit is just as easy for a college student to hire a semiconductor design team as it is for Tim Cook, so long as the college student has their business model in order.
Another way to think about this is "AIs take away the finance jobs".
That will (largely) negate the competitive advantage of capital, people will realize there are plenty of resources to go around, stop working so many hours, and eventually stop thinking about money during daily transactions like feeding each other, fixing things, fabricating personal items, etc.
This will, with respect to resource allocation, represent a successful transition from "Capitalism" to "Anarchism" * , although money will still be used for certain activities involving superpersonal (more than what a person needs) amounts of resources (yachts, blockbuster films, musid festivals, etc). And some locales will stay under a propertarian regime. Regulatory capture is too slow to tip the balance of power back to Capital, although it will cause some hiccups along the way.
* Besides the dissolution of property, Anarchism also suggests changes to social expectations around state-sponsored violence, but that's is a whole other discussion. I am not aware of a satisfying story for how that goes down.
But who gets the advertising revenue isn't the relevant policy concern. The government shouldn't care whether Google gets that revenue or someone else. The relevant policy concerns are what level of privacy protections do people want, and what practical choices do people have to protect their privacy. There is so little competition in either the market for ISPs or the market for search services that it doesn't make sense to leave privacy up to market mechanisms in either case.
Google has evolved far beyond just showing you an ad in response to a search. It tracks you throughout the Internet, leveraging its massive affiliate network. It's the default search engine on both mobile platforms. It's got more than 50% browser market share. Even if you don't go to Google.com or gmail.com, it's nearly impossible to avoid emailing someone with a gmail address, texting someone with an Android phone, visiting a Google affiliate website, etc. Pointing to the possibility of using Google alternatives is as ridiculous and self serving as pointing to satellite as broadband competition.
1. If Google tracks me, they have maybe 50-70% coverage of my whereabouts. My ISP gets 100%.
2. I mistrust Telcos more than Google, based on historical example.
Google hasn't quite remained true to "Don't Be Evil" (dollars are corrosive, billions of dollars doubly so), but at least they sorta try.
I grew up under Telecom, later called Telstra.
They do more than supercookies.
How does deregulating ISPs get us any closer to regulating search engines?
That first step alone is enough to make a lot of ad targeting irrelevant.
What a lot of people might not realize is that with the shift to mobile browsing and Apple disabling third-party cookies by default a lot of the data on ad networks and brokers has gone completely dark. It's a real crisis in the industry, and ironically one of the things that is driving new moves such as combining ISP data for tracking.
The problem with the ISP tracking, and the reason why I think it is one of the greatest privacy threats consumers have ever faced - is that there is no easy tech solution. There is no 'disable ISP tracking' option in your browser in the same way there is for cookies.
Cookies are well regulated. Any attempt to bypass user controls results in FCC action. There is no equivalent to this with ISP data (any longer).
But part of the solution if the regulations stay the way they are may well be that VPNs are made easier by being built into operating systems and provided by for ex. Apple as part of iCloud
> You can't easily avoid emailing people with gmail accounts, or communicating with people on Android phones.
I'm genuinely curious if you have a cite on Google using received emails in ad targeting. Likewise with receiving messages on Android devices - because neither are in their privacy policy[0].
Google do run services that aren't part of the ad targeting dragnet - partly because a lot of the data is useless if you're not a Google user and not terribly additionally useful if you are a Google customer
> using e.g. browser fingerprinting techniques.
The article you linked to talks about Google and Facebook using SSO. Actual browser fingerprinting to bypass user privacy settings is illegal. There are many cases of the FTC smacking companies down for that.[1][2][3][4]
[0] https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/08/googl...
[2] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/191409/kissme...
[3] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/291523/turn-s...
[4] https://www.engadget.com/2016/12/20/ftc-tells-verizon-superc...
The point is, just as with ISPs, whether you can "opt out" of Google depends entirely on what Google chooses to do or not do (in the future, if not now). Even if you don't use Google services, its almost impossible to not send information to those who do. When I first saw ads on Google fifteen years ago I never expected that it'd be tracking me across the Internet and reading all the mail I send my family, but here we are.
> Actual browser fingerprinting to bypass user privacy settings is illegal.
Source? All your links relate to misrepresentations in disclosure, not the underlying practice being illegal.
If your privacy policy says "we're gonna look down your pants if we can figure out how", I think you're pretty much free to do so.
If you can buy something from Amazon, you can lease a VPN service. If you can download and install some silly game, you can download and install a VPN client. Which just works. So yes, it's easy.
To opt out of third-party cookies, you actually need to tweak browser preferences. How is that easier than pay, download and install?
First, there is the trade off of speed, location, protocol. Will a US based VPN be private enough? Do they really not log? Who do I trust?
Next there is actual usage: my Phillips hue lights don't sync with my alarm if the VPN is turned on. Torrents don't work if the VPN isn't on the slowest protocol. A few more in that vein.
This means that even after I've found and paid for a VPN I think I can trust, I have to be constantly switching it on and off, and have to be vigilant about what browsing I do when.
In my opinion, people tend to expect too much from VPNs, and then worry too much. VPNs don't provide anonymity. There's no way for users to know what they log. But if ISP tracking is the threat, pretty much any of the major privacy-centric VPN services is probably OK. The short list, in my opinion, is AirVPN, BolehVPN, IVPN, Mullvad and PIA. Not HMA, for sure.
I'm not sure what the deal with your alarm and lights would be. But I'm guessing that it's a firewall rule that blocks LAN access when the VPN is connected. About torrents, do you really mean "slowest protocol"? I would have thought that torrents would like the fastest protocols, with the least encryption load (such as BF-CBC).
Switching on and off, and keeping track of that, is problematic. Banks etc don't like VPNs, and neither does Netflix. But if ISP tracking is the threat, a few leaks won't matter much.
Google Fiber was a fluffy bunny sort of thing.
Verizon trying to drain the river of gold before it reaches Google is existential-threat stuff. In their position I would go to the mattresses.
Google Fiber was Larry realizing that Google was vulnerable to competition from its infrastructure providers and trying to get ahead of it before those companies realized too. I worked on it when it launched in 2012. It was very much a defensive play then as now: the idea was that if Google won, they would get revenue and a defensive moat, while even if they lost, they would improve broadband speeds, spur competition, and build a defensive moat. They just didn't figure on a bureaucratic quagmire. I suspect that Larry still recognizes the threat, but thinks that Loon, Fi, and WebPass are more promising approaches to head it off.
They also apparently didn't figure on the slow and expensive business of lobbying. If the matter is unimportant to voters, that makes it available to what I will charitably call "the most civic-minded and purposefully engaged company".
And of course, your theory would imply Google has less pull with municipal governments in Silicon Valley than an incumbent based on the opposite coast. It's an utterly ridiculous theory akin to complaining that WalMart can't get a fair shake in Benton, Arkansas.
The broadband technology may have postdated CEQA, but Verizon already had the right-of-ways, utility poles, and trenches dug. My parents were one of the first customers for Verizon Fios when it launched. They ran our fiber line over the telephone pole that had been outside our house since it was built in 1960.
The fight described in the Tech Dirt article isn't about Google being denied access to existing poles. It's over a "one touch make ready" ordinance that speeds up the process (which currently can take months) by allowing the new ISP to move existing wires while hanging up their own. The ordinances were passed specifically to facilitate Google's fiber deployment. One touch should probably be part of the federal regulation. But without such an ordinance you can still get access to the poles, it just takes longer.
(There is a political dimension to the one touch fight that's probably not well known here. Currently, unionized telco and power company workers are guanranteed to get some work out of the process of a new ISP coming in. Under one touch, a new ISP could come in and hire a non-union contractor to do all the work: http://www.tennessean.com/story/money/2016/09/09/t-workers-f.... It's not a good reason for holding up fiber deployment, but it's why the opposition to one touch laws has more traction than you'd expect.)
I remember the good old days when privacy was important enough that video rental stores weren't allowed to share your data. Now it's just good business.
But one can still infer actual page a user is visiting by means of looking at some leakage of data. See https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/4388/are-urls-v....
It isn't easy but I am sure some people have done it.
One thing ISP has been doing for years is with DNS. If you are at home and you entered some wrong domain name, your ISP will likely present you with its custom search page. This is enough to understand what you are looking for. Furthermore, Google & Facebook aren't relying on cookies as the only way to mine your interest anymore, instead they focus on building profile for you when you use single sign on. For example, when you sign up for Stackoverflow and chooses to login with your Google account, Google may be able to learn you are using Stackoverflow.
Verizon in particular has been in the ads business for years, especially with their acquisition of AOL and on-going acuqisiton of Yahoo, Verizon has a big plan to make use of all the data they have, likely to provide a Google search or new portal for their users, much like AOL back in the days in the 90s and early 2000s.
There's existing companies that already do this.
You can do this for $5 a month by renting a droplet virtual server on Digital Ocean and setting up Streisand. Don't log anything. You will control the VPS/VPN. Use it for your mobile phone and household router (if your router supports this). If not, individual machines, but having a router that does this is key.
Use Opera and it's free VPN until you can get something sorted for yourself.
apple does it all the time. shit, walgreens does it when you buy the waldrug instead of whatever else.
How? I never noticed this. Is the ad printed on the receipt or something like that?
Google fiber is still a useful stick as Google can just say paying you X billion for Y years before running you out of business is option A, option B is not paying you anything you chose. It's a large part of why YouTube has avoided many of Netflix's issues with ISP's.
This is the same that Verizon/Comcast wants to do. Provide an arbitrary service (i.e ISP) and also do something else with the data. Just because, I _pay_ comcast but don't pay Google does not relinquish Google from the responsibility. IMO, we need new internet/tech laws that explicitly cover companies that monetize user data.
Maybe someone can help me understand the distinction between these two.
Yes, pretty much. It is very unlikely you are a monopoly with your SaaS, and it is very unlikely you are holding my protected data like medical records.
I stopped going to the cinema and download the movies for this reason but of course I didn't stop taking planes. Apparently in the US you cannot really choose your ISP so it's gonna be bad...
I do notice that creepy stalker-style ads about specific products I recently searched for no longer pop up when I browse in anonymous mode.
Verizon is the pipe we move data over - it's the road. "Google" is the service at the other end of the pipe - it's our destination. Verizon is unhappy with being the pipe, despite that literally being the business they signed up to be in. They have decided that the destinations make more money than they can ever squeeze out of being the road service. So, they hatched a plan...
Verizon is now trying to use the fact that we're going to "Google" to instead funnel customers into their destinations - "You don't need "Google", use "Verizoogle" instead!" Verizon also wants to install toll lanes on their roads such that even using "Google" proper costs you extra. And it costs "Google" extra too, because why only charge in one direction?
Still going to stare blankly and refuse to see the problem?
The problem isn't Verizon; the problem is voters who allow their representatives to remain in office without passing legislation to fix this.
Don't blame corporations for working within the system they're presented. Blame an apathetic voter base.
Very convenient, especially given how the dysfunctional US electoral system means voting for change isn't possible.
I can blame both. Ethical companies will not abuse a bad law, nor will they pay millions to lobby to break laws, or use the Citizen's United ruling to pour money into electing people who will pass laws they want. It's hard to even see how it is possible to vote against them now that they've got billions of dollars to make any decision they see fit law, simply by squeezing the arm of whichever tool they installed in the legislator. But maybe we should blame the Supreme Court - if only that too wasn't gamed by politicians baselessly denying the nomination of first Garland and now Gorsuch as retaliation.
Corruption is corruption, whether it is political or commercial.
Squabbling on Hacker News? Does zero. Let's get something done.
About search. You don't have to use it. You could go straight to the content producers website if you wanted. Chances are nobody would ever find that content. As a means to fund the search, Google presents ads.
Your ISP is another matter. You pay the ISP for the pipe. The ISP also lobbies your local municipality for monopoly service. They also want to sample your pipe and sell your data that you are paying them to carry for you.
Everything needs to go encrypted. From DNS, all email to all webpages. All the ISP deserves is a bunch of random characters.
You could equally well look at it this way: Lots of people make content for the "express purpose of distribution" on the Internet. The Internet, which is provided to you by Verizon, is the destination.
> About search. You don't have to use it. You could go straight to the content producers website if you wanted. Chances are nobody would ever find that content. As a means to fund the search, Google presents ads.
You don't have to use the Internet. You could walk straight to your favorite brick and mortar store or the movie theater. But you don't want to do that. Verizon wants to be compensated for its service, just as Google does.
> Everything needs to go encrypted. From DNS, all email to all webpages. All the ISP deserves is a bunch of random characters.
This is a better argument, and one I mostly agree with, though I'm not a fan of the moral implications in the word "deserve". Rather, I think, from a public policy point of view, the benefits of secure communications outweigh the interest from ISPs in monetizing their traffic.
For what it's worth, I'm uncomfortable with the idea that Google deserves all the advertising revenue, when it benefits indirectly from services that ISPs provide, sometimes at a loss due to regulation (being forced to serve remote areas and so forth, regulations that companies like Google do not have). I don't know what the right solution is, but I do acknowledge that it's a complicated issue, and Rayiner's point is not so easily dismissed.
Note that, as I stated before, I'm pro-net-neutrality in that it encourages a better public policy outcome, so you don't need to convince me of the benefits of the policy—I'm well aware.
And we do. I pay them every month as a matter of fact.
Uh, that makes so little sense that it kinda hurts my brain. Do you even understand what 'common carrier' is?
>You don't have to use the Internet.
There are services I use that only accept payment via the internet and are not available locally. Again this makes little sense.
> I'm uncomfortable with the idea that Google deserves all the advertising revenue,
Google doesn't get all of it, but they get a large majority because unlike everybody else a decade ago, they decided not to suck. Google will one day collapse under its own weight, your local cable monopoly will not.
>sometimes at a loss due to regulation (being forced to serve remote areas and so forth, regulations that companies like Google do not have)
Your cable company didn't have to do that. They only play the 'woe is me' trick when asking for money. If you countered that they didn't have to serve all the customers, but they would lose the monopoly they will stick with the monopoly every time. It is very profitable, and yes, I've worked for Cox in the and had lots of experience.
It is the destination, no matter how you try to reframe it. Google's just a destination that collects links to help you to get to other destinations, and pays for its service by showing ads. You can completely shut Google out of your life - block all DNS connections to Google's services, switch to Bing, turn on AdBlock, etc.
If your ISP is Verizon or peers with them, and your content exists on the other side of their network, there's absolutely nothing you can do to avoid them - they own the road. Common Carrier laws exist to prevent companies from discriminating based on the content provider. That's why Verizon has spent so much money to get around them.
Again, you can try to frame it however you like, but "Google" in this case could mean Reddit, it could mean HackerNews, YourCompanysWebsite, etc. It is literally a wildcard.
You can avoid their tracking by using a VPN.
Google is many destinations. The ISP isn't a destination, aka a host[1]
> Google's top services
...are a different problem at the application layer[2]. Yes, surveillance capitalism business models at Google et al is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. It's still a separate problem from ISP-level surveillance. It is unlikely that the same solution can be applied to both problems.
An ISP - aka a business that routes packets in the internetworking layer[3], is a very different market than the network endpoints ("destination", aka "host"). I can (and do) drop outgoing packets to many destinations.
> the content (website, video, etc.)
You're conflating internet hosts with services provided by those hosts.
[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122#page-6
[2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122#page-9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_layer
[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122#page-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_layer
You say that as though it's not true.
To be clear, I am just pointing out that singling out Verizon/Comcast does not get to the root of the problem. We need blanket laws that cover all companies that mine user data for profit. If there are no laws, well then everybody should be allowed to do whatever they want. Why give this privilege to Google (who also give an unrelated service).
(a) Many have criticised google over the years, especially it's slogan of "Do no evil". But the fact of the matter remains that, by and large, they have always convinced people with superior services, and been very careful not to through their weight around to force people to do business with them. They may actually be terribly evil, but their interests and those of consumers just happened to be aligned, most of the time. One example: they have never tried to block ad-blocking extensions from chrome, although it those are somewhat threatening to their business model. And despite conspiracy theories saying the opposite, it appears to me as if their search rankings are, to this day, not influenced by ad spending.
Providers, on the other hand, have a long history of anticompetitive behaviour and have proven that they are extracting the profits of being dominant whenever they can (proven by the much-better offers that suddenly materialised when Google Fibre came to some cities).
(b) Power: I'd argue that even for consumers, it's easier to largely avoid using google, than it is to avoid providers. It's almost a truism if you accept that there is tacit collusion in many areas where only two or three providers exist, i. e. they do not seem to be aggressively competing with each other.
Almost more importantly, at least in this crowd, may be how afraid people are of the end of net neutrality. We have all seen how cool ideas (sometimes) managed to grow into something extremely useful (or fun, or beautiful). At least I am horrified of a future where this becomes impossible, because the pipe companies want to extract every penny they can, and they do it by requiring everyone, everywhere to pay them. This isn't about the money. It's about retaining the slightly anarchic dynamism of an internet where a good idea, some technical expertise and $4 for a domain registration may be enough to change the world.
If you have even two choices of ISPs, you are very lucky. For a lot of people it's Verizon or the highway, and for those lucky few with choice it's usually something like Comcast or Verizon, which now that I think about it doesn't sound so lucky after all.
I understand arguing that neither of these companies should get to pull this shit. I don't get how you could claim that there isn't a material difference in the level (and type) of coercion being applied.
You can opt out not using Google. You can probably use DNT (there are three options and it's confusing plus DNT isn't something websites and advertisers really honor these days, was a shit show), and some services also include opt-out button for certain data to be not collected.
But you can't opt-out not using your ISP since your ISP owns the pipe. That is a huge concern. With Verizon's notorious history of tracking users, modifying unencrypted HTTP requests, scares a lot of people, even if you aren't privacy conservative, you should be concerned.
Once again the consumer loses.
> Maybe someone can help me understand the distinction between these two.
The difference lies in that it's rather easy to escape Google's purview -- if you don't like Gmail, you can pay for any one of multiple paid email services that don't monetise anything beyond your credit card. I do exactly that.
With Comcast/Verizon, it's a lot harder to access an alternative service -- both have spent decades building up nationwide networks and use their quasi-monopoly statuses in anti-competitive ways (at every level and scale, see stuff like municipal/local rules around utility poles and other rights-of-way for fibre and coax).
It's trivial for me to shell out a few dollars per month to access another email service that doesn't do ads and doesn't monetise my data. It's orders of magnitude more painful and expensive for me to access internet with something other than the duopoly of shitty DSL or shitty Comcast DOCSIS service.
Let's say you decide Google is bad and you want to stop using it. What do you do?
1. Instead of typing "google.com" into your browser, you type in "duckduckgo.com", "bing.com", or any of a bazillion other sites.
There you go, done.
Now let's say you decide you don't like Comcast and want to switch to a different ISP, what do you do?
1. Nothing. Comcast is probably the only ISP in your area. Sorry. No new ISP for you!
Or (Advanced users only):
1. Convince another ISP to open in your area. This may involve investing hundreds of millions of dollars in running physical cable and stuff like that.
2. Wait several years for the relevant infrastructure to be installed.
3. Switch to that one other ISP.
4. Discover that it isn't noticeably better because it turns out a duopoly isn't much more effective at encouraging efficiency than a monopoly is.
5. A year or two later, Comcast buys out the other ISP.
Markets are only efficient (read: "work") when barriers to entry for producers and switching costs for consumers are low. Both of those are very very true for web sites. They are very very not true for ISPs.