Comment by rainsford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rainsford | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with you, but there's also a business model aspect I think you're missing. Your ISP might be interested in monetizing your personal data to add to the ways they make money, but for companies like Google and Facebook, making money from your personal data is basically their entire business model.

Given enough opposition, Verizon, Comcast, etc, could strongly embrace personal data privacy and still continue as companies. Yes, they'd lose a business opportunity, but they still make a lot of money selling you internet access and that wouldn't go away. The same is not really true of companies like Google or Facebook. Collecting and making money off your personal data is the foundation of their business. Strongly protecting your privacy would require them to change their entire way of making money.

I think you could argue either way whether Google or Verizon has more ability to spy on you, but Google absolutely has a stronger business motivation to collect your data than Verizon does.

> The same is not really true of companies like Google or Facebook. Collecting and making money off your personal data is the foundation of their business. Strongly protecting your privacy would require them to change their entire way of making money.

For Facebook maybe, but Google was a large and successful business before its 'personalized' targeting was really that advanced. AdWords ran for a full four years without any kind of search personalization, and up until 2012, it was possible to turn off search personalization entirely. Google made $37bn in 2011. [1] Google Display Network, the area of Google's business that would most obviously be disrupted by a move toward strong user privacy, only makes a fraction of that still. [2]

While I completely agree that Facebook would struggle without behavioral targeting, being able to buy ads on a PPC basis for users with 'intent' will always be a valuable product for advertisers, regardless of targeting.

[1] https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/23/google-revenue...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266245/advertising-reven...

Indeed. Google never really had to go this "ultra-targeted ads" approach. Perhaps it's the difference between Google making $30 billion in profit a year and "only" $10 billion in profit a year, and the difference between them mainly sticking to the search business and them paying for all of these failed projects like the $12 billion Motorola acquisition, Boston Dynamics, (even Nest, I'd say), and so on.

But as a company it never really needed to do those. Heck, Google doesn't even need to be in the self-driving business.

I think it's a failure of competition and anti-trust laws that companies are allowed to grow this big to get their fingers into all the pies out there. The only reason they even go into all of these different industries is because they've made so much money they don't know what to do with it.

Sooner or later we're going to have to deal with this rampant increase in monopolies and we'll have to take some drastic measures to do it. We may even have to break-up companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, Comcast, Disney, Goldman Sachs, and others, because they were never supposed to turn into such large conglomerates. The fact that they did was a failure of competition laws to stop them from growing this big in the first place.

Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon are now allowed to spy on you, then buy media and ad companies, and then use that data to manipulate you for political purposes so you end-up voting for the candidates that will help them further consolidate their power. We should have put a stop to that along the way.

Motorola wasn't the failure you think it was. That was, as I understand it, about patent acquisition. They got what they want and then dumped what they didn't.

Per Thiel's "theory" (as seen in Zero to One) most of Google's "failures" are a cover for their search monopoly.

GDN is not the only piece of business that'll be impacted by strong user privacy. Search and YT will also be impacted, given there's ability to buy ads based on users being in-market for a product/service etc [1]

You can also be targeted with ads based on emails you receive in Gmail - it was possible to target down to keywords in emails, but that was discontinued. Now, the emails you receive, domains your getting them from etc. influence signals, that puts you into an 'audience' that can be used for targeting across the Google network.

Without the ability to do targeting, or personalization, as Google calls it, their business will fall apart. Everything they do is geared to collecting more information about users to improve "personalization" - from Google Assistant, to Google Home [2]. It's so advanced that your experience (results) on their platfrom, especially within Search -- will be unique to you.

Google will fight alongside AT&T, Comcast, etc to protect their business model, in-fact Google is trying to reach their ranks with the 5G war [3]

[1] https://searchengineland.com/google-adwords-in-market-audien...

[2] https://twitter.com/benthompson/status/864293485439893505

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-29/google-le... - (search for: Spectrum Access System )

There was an ISP called NetZero that used this business model to provide free dial up and I think later on, free DSL in the 2000s. So this isn't a new concept, except what everyone is saying they (the ISPs) are now doing it without any kind of exchange of value apparently.

Oh, man, I remember NetZero. Hadn’t thought about them in ages. There was another similar company called Juno, iirc. I almost miss the days of free dialup services—where I explicitly chose to see ads in exchange for a free service, and the company was upfront that this was the exchange being performed.

I used both of those services and it is really amazing that the quality of ads from Google and Facebook 16+ years later is pretty much the same as NetZero/juno

I agree with you, but there is one key difference...you are paying your ISP for the service. Google, FB, etc. provide free service offerring in exchange for your data.

If ISPs are going to monetize customers traffic then their terms of use better damn well call that out.

There is potential here for new business model for privacy based ISPs (ex: think duckduckgo for ISP) where customers pay a premium for such an offering.

Do you need an ISP? How about a preconfigured router / modem that uses a privacy-minded DNS + VPS? My parents and most of my friends for example wouldn't know how to do any of that.

Mind you many of them have no idea, but as their goto I could make a smart recommendation and they would likely follow.

Oh! And package it with a better than average 2FA. Maybe a Yubikey or similar.

More or less sec in a box. Perhaps not 100% complete and bulletproof but better than the current situation.

bahnhof.se is an example of this. (swedish isp).

No there isn’t. Where in the world can you select your ISP? in a meaningful way.

Not the U.S, that's for sure.

But from what I've heard practically anywhere in Europe, and definitely in Japan.

You have Internet choice in most of Europe if you count DSL, but people in the U.S. tend to dismiss DSL out of hand. Excluding DSL, in German you've got cable ISPs which largely don't compete in the same geographic area, and almost no fiber penetration. France is similar, though with more fiber (but still less than in the U.S.).

yeah in Japan you have major net providers and there is even a difference between the network you rent and the ISP. For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line.

> For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line

as an american living in a major city, this exceeds my wildest dreams of internet service.

It's the difference between a regulated pro-consumer free market, and a lobbyist controlled market presenting a duopoly as a free market.

It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful.

The difference is that NTT lost money for years offering wholesale fiber below cost: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.489... (pages 11, 16). It could do that because it has a national near-monopoly in the wholesale space (it get some money from every subscriber, no matter what ISP they use), Japan's economy offers much lower returns than the U.S.'s (making low return infrastructure investments relatively more attractive), and NTT is 1/3 owned by the government (which ordered it to deploy fiber, regardless of profits).

> It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful.

Well regulation can be harmful if it protects the incumbents and prevents the introduction of new players. Lobbyists are usually pushing for more regulation, not the opposite.

It's not about regulation or not regulation, it's about what kind of regulation makes sense for a free market.

If this is a serious question in Kiev I had a choice of 4 high speed providers at a cost of about 1/10 what equivalent xfinity service is costing me here :)

Your random eastern european country? My apartment complex is wired by at least 2 ISPs. If I don't feel like using any of them, LTE-for-home boxes are available for reasonable price with reasonable data caps from a couple other ISPs.

pretty much everywhere in europe.

In India, most metro have 2-3 broadband providers, and most of country have 4-6 mobile internet provider.

I have three major ISPs available where I live that can over 100+ meg service.

Four here (Portuguese city near Lisbon) offering at least 250mbps.

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