Hacker News Reader

Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

This is so two-faced. This is the key line:

> Once these approaches have addressed the needs of users, publishers, and advertisers, and we have developed the tools to mitigate workarounds…

A browser vendor that cared about its users would make a browser for them, not publishers or advertisers. It would block all tracking garbage by default.

Just admit it Justin, the real Chrome customers are advertisers. You don't actually give a shit about users if it interferes with ad dollars.

Edit: I left out this good quote

> Some ideas include new approaches to ensure that ads continue to be relevant for users

More user-hostile advertiser appeasement.

View on HN

Markets don't work unless both consumers and producers are satisfied. A classic two-sided market is Ebay. If there were nobody selling stuff there, then nobody would shop there. If nobody bought stuff there, nobody would sell there. You need to satisfy both buyers and sellers (somewhat) to have a market.

Google is just acknowledging that for-profit, advertising-supported websites are a three-sided market; consumers, website authors, and advertisers all have interests. Figuring out how to satisfy everyone is tricky.

It may be that these competing interests can't all be satisfied and an advertising-supported Internet isn't going to make it in the long term, but they are going to try.

> It may be that these competing interests can't all be satisfied and an advertising-supported Internet isn't going to make it in the long term, but they are going to try.

Of course they can't all be satisfied. The needs of advertisers are diametrically opposed to the privacy needs of users. There is no way to square this problem so that both groups are happy and Google certainly understands this. They aren't "trying" things out as experiments, they are executing on strategies to ensure their dominance over the business of digital advertising.

Not all users have the same privacy desires.

Many (most?) are happy to provide their personal information "by default" in exchange for better ad targeting, lower prices, etc.

I'm sure most are just ignorant as to how much information they are exchanging and not necessarily happy to provide this "by default".

And many of them are equally ignorant as to how much money they have saved due to ad-powered web. What we really need is a transparency on this trade-off, not just bashing the status quo.

There is nothing wrong in being ignorant if the efforts to get rid of that ignorance outweigh the benefits for most users. My mother spends 15 minutes on internet talking to me and watching youtube. She does not care if advertisers know her age and location.

There has actually been research on this (in small settings). Even when made aware of the potential consequences, people do not choose to pay significantly more for equivalent products with better privacy protection.

"Everybody is just ignorant" is not a good way of evaluating markets.

Extremely dubious claim. What personal information? To which companies? For how long? Etc.

Have you considered the possibility that the future behavior of consumers and lawmakers is not that easy to predict and people have different opinions about it? We can't reliably predict which products will be popular, the next election, or what laws will pass.

Past results are that the advertising-supported Internet is enormously lucrative. Things are changing though. We will find out what happens when it happens.

Google doesn't need to predict the future of an advertising supported internet when they can manipulate it directly eg. with their chrome marketshare.

Although Google is a powerful position, this is fundamentally not how markets work. Google is not a dictator directly controlling users, advertisers, or websites. They are other people who make their own decisions based on their perceived interests.

Not even monopoly markets are dictatorships.

But why should a browser care about anyone other than the users of the browser? The browser is meant to be my user agent, not a third-party market maker.

(yeah, I know they have to care about website designers, otherwise every website will just break, but when you have substantially a huge share of the browser share, you can tell website designers to get stuffed and they will have to deal with it)

I'm being intentionally simplistic- sometimes, complicating things with markets and so on feels like it obscures more than it illuminates.

Even if you ultimately care more about users, the incentives are still towards centrism. For example, Firefox still needs to do DRM to keep Netflix happy because users want to watch Netflix videos and will switch browsers to do it.

Compatibility is important, even for the market leader, because if they break too many websites too quickly, that will push people to switch browsers like nothing else. Especially if it's a big website people use every day.

Chrome does have a somewhat easier time taking the lead on deprecating things but it often requires multi-year campaigns and gradual steps. (Consider the campaigns to kill NSAPI and Flash.) This is needed even for Google to maintain compatibility with its own websites.

The analogy to markets still works. Ebay can change the rules to be more buyer-friendly but not so much that too many sellers leave, because buyer-friendly rules don't matter if you can't find the thing you want to buy.

An example of the market breaking down is major news sites blocking Chrome's Incognito mode, despite Chrome's gradual attempts to make fingerprinting harder.

The World Wide Web is not a market.

Google cares very much about its customers. Its customers are advertisers. Like any good business, it puts its customers first, and anything beneficial it offers anyone else is just to serve its customers, ultimately.

> it puts its customers first

Have you ever dealt with Google as a customer :) ?

It is not that easy.

Consider Mozilla, the privacy maniacs. Even they let proprietary and intrusive DRM plugin inside, though it is totally contradicts FOSS approach https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7746585

This is life -- you have to take other parties interests into account or you will be buried.

Start block all tracking garbage by default and sites will ban your users, forcing them to choose another product.

Speaking about Google: when you're (unlike Apple) making most of your revenue from ads, any hostile action to ad industry will be considered hypocrisy and unfair competition

The DRM is totally different though. Not having it means certain sites can’t be used.

And ad supporters say that not providing facilities for personalized ads means sites wouldn't be able to exist.

Ad supporters are wrong about this as a blanket statement. There are tons of useful sites that exist, many for years or decades, without any advertising at all.

Some sites would go behind paywalls, some would cease to exist, and some will just run nontargeted ads, but some would do none of those things.

I’m not saying they wouldn’t be able to exist though. I’m saying you wouldn’t be able to use them. Firefox does not have the market share to be able to force change there, they’d only be making the experience shittier for their users. You’re welcome to turn the feature off if you don’t like it.

There is no difference.

These sites that can't be used without DRM plugin do not provide you a way around DRM because you're ruining their business model (at least they think so, or their content providers).

The same goes with ads. If your browser start for example blocking ads at sites that live from it (like New York Times website), website administration will eventually ban your browser at all.

Privacy and ethics around proprietary software, while obviously related (in that open software is obviously more transparent), are largely orthogonal. You can have closed/proprietary software that respects privacy (Apple), and you can have open software that doesn't (Chrome).

This just smells of whataboutism.

As for your hypothesis that websites will start blocking browsers that ban tracking and so forth, frankly, that remains to be seen, and my bet is we'd never actually see that happen in practice. The optics are just too toxic. Surveillance capitalism survives because people don't know it's happening. Banning a browser like Firefox would call attention to an infrastructure and ecosystem that those individuals don't want to talk about in public.

Edit: As an aside, if sites did start banning privacy-conscious browsers like Firefox, I'd just stop going to those sites. In that respect, I'd actually perversely appreciate something like this: It'd finally make it blatantly obvious who is and isn't collecting and profiting from data about me and my actions online without my permission.

> As for your hypothesis that websites will start blocking browsers that ban tracking and so forth, frankly, that remains to be seen, and my bet is we'd never actually see that happen in practice.

The result of the GDPR regulAtions resulted in a moderate number of us websites refusing access to EU residents rather than attempt to comply. I think it's an entirely reasonably assumption that said sites would block a browser which attempted a similar idea

As I said in my edit: I'm actually fine with that (though I stand by my skepticism that it'd actually happen), as it's a clear and unambiguous signal that tells me which sites respect my privacy and which ones don't.

California now has a low that is similar to the EU law in many ways, and other states will soon, so those sites will soon have to block Americans as well, based on where they live if they can determine it, and soon they'll have to just give up and follow the law.

You're talking about CCPA, and I completely agree, GDPR-style privacy regimes are clearly the way the regulatory world is moving. It's just a matter of time at this point.

> if sites did start banning privacy-conscious browsers like Firefox, I'd just stop going to those sites.

I already do this -- if a site doesn't work with my defenses against the ad industry up, then I don't go back to that site.

Privacy ≠ FOSS.

DRM is an entirely different problem to that of privacy. While DRM is disgusting, a threat to open source as we know it and overall harmful to humanity as a whole, it does not inherently violate privacy.

Thus, saying "Even [the privacy maniacs] let proprietary and intrusive DRM plugin inside" doesn't make any sense.

Do you know anything about this DRM plugin? Why would you think it does not work in private mode? What would you say about long-living unique user id that it associate with your device that can be read? It does violate your privacy as well

AFAIK in firefox DRM plugins are sandboxed

Users demand browsers support Netflix and other streaming services which, unfortunately, requires supporting DRM. This is a case of Mozilla putting users first, despite it violating some of their core philosophy.

This is how it should work, users come first.

It's also a choice users are empowered to make.

Just as all this tracking protection stuff is optional but ships out of the box in a configuration that's deemed the most beneficial to the user, DRM, while enabled by default, can be disabled by simply uninstalling the plugin.

As I say: it just smells of whataboutism.

Additionally they pushed against it initially, and implemented it late. And now it's downloaded separately the first time you approve it's use. Users can disable it in settings.

Can we just stop for a second and ask whether advertising is required to support publishers at all?

Even if this question sounds naive, I feel like we should from time to time take a step back and review our situation.

> Speaking about Google: when you're (unlike Apple) making most of your revenue from ads, any hostile action to ad industry will be considered hypocrisy and unfair competition

I can agree with that (esp. given their monopoly), but the truth is not black and white here: there's a difference between applying the same measures equally to everyone and leaving a bunch of escape hatches for yourself, e.g. that time when Chrome decided to exclude certain Google cookies from the "Clear all cookies" screen.

> Can we just stop for a second and ask whether advertising is required to support publishers at all?

I think this misses a larger point: advertising on its own requires absolutely no tracking at all. Consider print publications. They still virtually all advertise. And their ads generally relate, in some way, to the demographics who read the publications. There's no reason that approach can't also work on the web.

The problem we're facing today is the notion that advertisers should be able to uniquely target individuals with specific ads. That's a new idea that I think we, as a society, need to reject.

> And their ads generally relate, in some way, to the demographics who read the publications. There's no reason that approach can't also work on the web.

That's how it USED to work on the web and still does in some parts. Until Google (and others) started selling increasingly accurate demographic and behavioural targeting. Now advertisers are addicted to targeting 50+ females who like baking, cats, have at least one grandchild and who have recently shown an interest in Easy Bake Ovens.

Is this working for them? I find it hard to believe that targeting more and more specific groups is actually worth the money for them. Is it really worth it to whatever company makes Easy Bake Ovens to pay for that kind of specific advertising? It seems (naively) that they would be better off finding out where their customers congregate and just buying ads there, without the extra cruft.

I mean, logically it should be worth it because they pay for it, but part of me is wondering if the ad companies are conning their customers on this.

I see what you mean, but I struggle to understand how is this a larger point?

I dislike ads for two reasons:

- highly targeted ads can impact my behaviour in ways I’m not aware of (existing vs. created needs, emotions vs. rational decisions) - it’s an invasion on our personal (internet) and public (your street, your neighbourhood) spaces.

The points above allow for manipulation at a unprecedented scale.

Again, this is more of a mental exercise, a problem I like to revisit from time to time, but if we take the points above into account, removing targeting doesn’t solve the issue completely.

I do think that contextual targeting is a more viable alternative, unless it becomes a rebranded version of behavioural (which is already happening).

Sorry, I should have been more clear. I think this is an important (larger) point because we don't need to pretend that this move would completely upend the ad industry. It will just slightly change it, and revert it to how it worked for the hundreds of years that preceded ~2005. I think ceding the argument that this change "breaks" advertising is the wrong move. I think it's important to keep focus of what we do want to break: the sleazy practice of tracking individuals so that they can be targeted for specific ads. That's gross, and absolutely deserves to go away. Publishers can continue to be supported by advertisements. There are tons of mailing lists that already work this way, and several very popular websites (e.g., Daring Fireball)

I am not saying they strike the right balance or not, but doesn't there have to be SOME balance?

Users need publishers to be able to make enough money to survive, or there won't be any content for them to use. You can't totally screw over either side, or the other will no longer exist.

What would happen if, for example, all advertising was made illegal globally?

I strongly doubt the internet would stop working.

More Wikipedia, more paywalls, less free news sites, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

A tremendous amount of resources are wasted on adtech - bandwidth, latency, which ultimately are accounted for in non-renewable time. Just compare using hacker news on mobile to reddit. I have a newish iPhone and reddit is basically unusable. Plausibly it’s a net-neutral situation, the downsides balancing out the upsides.

Similar evaluations can be made in the gaming space, comparing paid, freemium, and advertising driven. It wasn’t until fairly recently that advertising was even a viable revenue source for game developers.

The larger question perhaps is who loses their audience when they can no longer buy targeted advertising? Hint: it’s not the giant brands who blast billions of dollar blindly on mass advertising campaigns and can purchase Super Bowl commercials.

Disclaimer, a significant proration of the money I’ve made in the past decade + was from digital advertising.

> reddit is basically unusable

Just a tip, if I want to use reddit on an iPhone, I usually go to i.reddit.com or reddit.com/.compact

There are also third party apps (I like Slide for Reddit) which are pretty good.

> A tremendous amount of resources are wasted on adtech - bandwidth, latency

Not to mention cognitive resources. How much brain power has the world wasted on trying to get people to look at or click on things?

Given the absolutely ridiculous amount of content that is ad-funded, I very much disagree. All of my preferred youtubers and streamers would immediately be without livelihood. Same is probably true for a whole lot of news websites.

I suggest you pay those people with your money, instead of everyone’s privacy.

I'm completely fine with paying with my privacy. I feel like the vast majority of users prefers to look at ads compared to paying for content. Which matches reality where most people don't care if their browser blocks cookies or not.

As long as this patronage gets traction enough to support creators' livelihood. Unfortunately, the majority is not going to spend a single cent on those small creators when their alternatives are high quality contents built upon millions of dollars. It's even proven by Google Contributor program's failure.

> It's even proven by Google Contributor program's failure.

Although I think your point is correct, I don't think that this program's failure is evidence for it. I give cash money to numerous small creators, but there's absolutely no way that I would have used the Google Contributer program to do it. That requires more trust in Google than I can muster.

The point is that this needs to be done at scale. Even with Google's advantage on its pre-established publisher ecosystem, they couldn't make it because most publishers quickly realized that donation was not enough to offset the loss from disabling advertisements.

Most Magazines and Newspapers would stop too, since they're subsidized by advertising. Broadcast television and radio would cease to exist as well.

Public broadcasters don't live off advertising, do they?

In the US, public broadcasters get most of their money through contributions -- but advertising is a significant part of the mix as well.

The vast majority of the content on the internet would disappear and the entire western world would likely be thrown into one of the worst economic recessions in history.

Lots of non-ad companies rely on advertising. You would probably kill every marketing department worldwide. You would probably throw a huge number of companies in the world into chaos as they try to figure out how to grow revenue. The world would probably enter a depression worse than the 1920s as revenues severely tank because companies are not allowed to advertise their business.

"The world would probably enter a depression worse than the 1920s as revenues severely tank because companies are not allowed to advertise their business."

Nonsense. I'm not going to stop buying food or soap because I don't see ads for it.

Probably less than 5% of the internet would work as is. If you give more time (like 10 years), the number would be more than that though.

$300B is no way negligible by any mean and businesses are tightly coupled so the impact will propagate across everywhere. For instance, almost every functional search engines are powered by advertisement in some way (even DDG); how would you use the internet without a search engine?

In the short term I think many sites would die, but in the longer run we would see other forms of people trying influence other people to make them buy something or vote for something or believe in something.

I fear that we would see a huge wave of advertising in disguise and other not necessarily more transparent forms of indirect funding and influencing.

For instance, there would suddenly be a very big incentive for product companies to become media companies themselves to make the distinction between reporting, advertising and simply describing their own product go away.

I believe an advertising ban would have a very large number of unintended and undesirable consequences.

There's no reason to conflate "advertising" with "user-targeted advertising". There's nothing inherently privacy-breaking about advertising. A regular billboard doesn't track users, a print magazine ad doesn't track users and there's no reason internet advertisements absolutely need to track users.

I wasn't conflating anything! I would be perfectly happy if all forms of advertising went away, targeted or otherwise. This wasn't a conversation about the reasons advertising was bad. I was just commenting that I don't think the internet would break if publishers stopped making money through advertising.

It's very weird that one browser is so dominant that they, somehow, are expected to make some sort of dictatorial decision on this. If there were meaningful competition, it would not be a problem, since people would just swap browsers. That people think Chrome could single handedly destroy the internet if they made the wrong choice seems to indicate that there's a huge problem. One company shouldn't be able to screw over either side- the internet is huge, and we've delegated these decisions to exactly one company. It's bananapants.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_18_...

> In particular, Google:

> has required manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search app and browser app (Chrome), as a condition for licensing Google's app store (the Play Store);

Oh, yeah, it's not organic. But it's happened and we've let it happen, and people are now talking about it as if it's just the background state of things that Google can singlehandedly decide which direction to take the web.

I almost miss Slashdot style "Micro$$$oft" discussions, at least people had some baseline hostility toward browser hegemony.

I'm not sure why any of this requires third-party cookies or the bloatware that modern websites have become in order to enable this sort of tracking by dozens of entities. The most healthy and consumer-friendly advertising ecosystems (broadcast/cable TV and podcasts are good examples) are the ones where individual tracking is _not_ possible. As soon as it becomes a pure numbers game tied to individuals, then you get the arms race of fraud and manipulation that has led us to the current terrible state of the web.

> I am not saying they strike the right balance or not, but doesn't there have to be SOME balance?

No, absolutely not. User-targeted advertising does not need to exist, a priori. Plenty of empires were built on privacy-friendly content-targeted advertising in the past and there's no reason that can't be done now. Except that Google would make far less money.

The "balance" that needs to be had is simple: don't spy on people. If you have their informed consent for data collection, then you aren't spying.

You're aware that if Google with its monopoly on Search and quasi-monopoly on Chrome started blocking ads, they would get sued out of hell for monopoly abuse in the EU and probably everywhere else except the US, right?

This is actually a legitimate problem already where Google has paid adlockers to not block google.com by default. As an example, say some other vertical search engine purchases advertising on Google (travel, price comparison, etc) those same users who clicked on google may not see any advertising on the vertical search engine which, in those two markets accounts for a very large amount of those search engine’s own revenue.

I think a probable scenario is that Google’s search ads and display ads business will have to be segmented from the rest of Google’s businesses. The other alternative may be to remove search bundled with search advertising, YouTube with its accompanying video advertising, and so on.

I would be more optimistic about Google’s ability to keep itself together, but they seem to have turned themselves in to a case study of corporate mismanagement and disfunction. Who knows what sorts of insane criminal things and accumulating at this point. Those future moments of weakness and going to make them incredibly vulnerable to regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, from both the right and the left. That is not a survivable position.

Blocking ad tracking means breaking the web. It's OK if user willingly wants to break the web for himself by installing addons. But blocking standard mechanisms by default is unacceptable, at least before you develop new standards. Countless websites were broken because browsers started to block popup windows. It was extremely stupid decision.

"Countless websites were broken because they used popup windows."

I fixed it for you.

> Blocking ad tracking means breaking the web.

So, this monster is "too big to fail"? All the more reason to kill it now before it gets even worse.

>> to ensure that ads continue to be relevant for users

When users can't be tracked, ads will be less targeted which means Google will not be as valuable to advertisers.

Users can be tracked, easily, without third-party cookies, by an organisation with enough presence across the web. Google has JavaScript on over half of the top 100 000 most popular websites.

i feel this comment is a lot more hateful than helpful.

i don't understand how this helps the conversation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com