They assume that just because they don’t have a problem paying $5/mo, rest of the world doesn’t either. Their naive solution (“charge me money!”) is all about providing them some privacy while leaving the overwhelming majority of the world either without the free services or without the same privacy the relatively-rich would get.
As Jaron Lanier pointed out in his recent TED talk, with previous information technologies like books we figured out how to both charge for the information being distributed while providing access free of charge to those who could not afford it via public libraries. https://www.ted.com/talks/jaron_lanier_how_we_need_to_remake...
Furthermore, what Feld and others are describing here is an economic externality. You could both be right that many people would not and/or could not pay $5/month, yet still the negative social cost of a free product costs that user far more in the long run in the form of political unrest.
I believe you’re referring to the last elections. But the way I see it, this is mostly a case of people whose candidate lost wanting to change the rules of the game because their candidate lost. I voted for Hillary but I’m not delusional to blame the results on any nefarious use of ad targeting before blaming the campaign’s poor strategy (specifically, pouring money into states like Arizona to end up with 3m+ votes while getting too few votes in states that made a difference.)
Political campaigns are waged within the media landscape of the day. When Nixon sweated during the first televised debate, he lost the debate and the election. That signaled a transition from radio to TV as the dominant medium for political campaigns, and the types of candidates who won national office in the TV era were different from those from earlier eras. In that way the dominant medium of the day has a filtering & selection effect on who succeeds in a political race. Trump's election signaled another transition, this time to the era of social media. It's not partisan to worry about the type of candidates that transition will push to the fore.
And we can a apply your other plan in parallel in you have one, to maximize efficiency. And if you don't, well, then you realize it's though.
Things don’t become cheap in a vacuum: advertising is literally how many things that would have cost money could be offered for free. In that sense, we already have a solution to what you describe.
It’s been over a decade since the iPhone was launched. Its cost hasn’t come down. So Apple can boast all it wants about its privacy features but it’s not a mass market product outside of the US. For proof, just look at their marketshare in countries like India. I think if in a decade a company like Apple hasn’t been able to figure out a way to lower price in order to make their privacy-first product more affordable, it’s at least worth admitting this is a very hard problem to solve at scale. And I say this as an Apple fanboy.
Huh? Says who? How much do you think you could charge for an iPhone 3G today?
Apple hasn't lowered prices in the manner you're imagining because they are a luxury brand. Their business model is that you pay extra so that other people can see that you own an iPhone. Lowering prices means they get less money while losing value. But Apple has lowered prices in a very real sense, by providing much more performance at the same inflation-unadjusted prices.
True, but also, you’re using a much older version of a revolutionary product.
The price was lowered by $200 shortly after release, causing outrage amongst the earliest buyers. Compensatory credits were issued to affected customers.
Later, Apple began selling previous models as a more affordable line rather than eliminating them each cycle. The newest models retain their price point, but devices from the previous year receive a price cut.
They haven’t started making low cost commodity devices at the bottom of the market, but Apple typically doesn’t compete in that area.
Unfortunately this externality is not like environmental externalities. You can't just "fix" it by throwing money at mitigation measures (ie scrubbers, tree planting, fluid separation, dispersants, breakdown agents, remediation), the cost is fused into the society in subtle and difficult ways to isolate and measure.
What does that mean? Well for completing information in the market we can't scrap it completely. But we also want to cut out the psychological aspects surely? Obviously any solution would be imperfect, so I'm going to start with: We need a stricter, more comprehensive ratings agency in the way that films/TV games and music is rated. The greater the psychological impact, the less it can be broadcast to the public at large. So bland statements of technical specifications could be displayed anywhere, but something which says "buy now, limited time only, you'll miss out and your life will suck" will be limited to exclusively infomercial channels only.
So what do we do about the money side then? How will people pay for the services they can't actually afford? No idea. I'd like to put a tax on advertising, but how does that meaningfully go to people, or website holders? However, society getting to a state of charging people to skip ads/aka opt out, while not earning enough sounds a lot like Black Mirror.
This may be a case where an imperfect solution is still better than nothing. One where it should be reassessed constantly, lest loopholes eventually become exploited, like they are in almost any regulation or tax code which does not change.
I read this post over and over trying to tweak it, but it still sounds ridiculous. But I don't know how else to continue the conversation.
a) who are advertisers targeting and why? If it’s people who can’t afford the service why are they then targeting them? Only people who have excess money are worth targeting. So there is a choice for most people.
b) take the example of Facebook. 1.5 bn daily users generate 9 bn $ in revenue, that’s 6 $ per year and active user, so 50c a month, not 5$/mo
b) Vast majority of current users won’t pay $5/mo. If 10% do (and I’d say that’s an exaggeration), then they’d need to charge $5/mo.
b) There is no way to tell. Maybe 80% would pay 50c a month. I’d say there is some middle ground between 100%/0$ and your assumption of 10%/5$.
If I had a billion dollars to spend building a paid version of fb versus spending that money educating everyone about the privacy controls they already have, I feel the latter would make much more of an impact than the former.
Facebook abuses data by using it for purposes other than providing the service they offer to their users, when those users for the most part have very little to no understanding what those other uses entail, plus there isn't even an option to refuse that use without being locked out of a de-facto monopoly service that they intentionally constructed in such a way as to achieve that monopoly.
As someone else has pointed out, education won’t help if the platform is abusing the data.