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Comment by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | Hacker News Reader

Thought experiment: Online advertising is regulated. How do so-called "tech" companies respond. Do they have a plan. Even if they continued to sell surveillance and data services, they would shrink in size.

There are various ways ads could be regulated and historical precedents.

Regardless of whether this ever happens, currently, online advertising is highly centralised and under increasing scrutiny. This centralisation is not the result of innovation by a select few companies but plain old M&A by the so-called "tech" giants, while the the government was apparently sleeping. If more competition were to take place in online ad services, this could potentially have a serious effect on the lifeblood of so-called "tech" giants. Time will tell.

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There's a solution that's far less invasive. The article offered it, and I've also repeatedly espoused it: "Enforcing open standards to enable users to share videos, images and texts across platforms is paramount."

The reason there are tech monopolies is because of the network effect. It's not practical to expect healthy competition in domains where your product's quality is primarily driven by the number of users you have, and they start with billions, and you start with zero.

Enforce open standards, prevent companies from coercing users to sign away their rights to content they generate, and you will have rich competition because you effectively eliminate the network effect.

No, the problem is no one is willing to pay for any of these services.

How many people are paying for their news? For something like YouTube? That stuff costs mega $$$

Back in the day, you were forced to pay for things. You wanted news? You had to put in some coins for a newspaper.

Now you sign on and you get news and YouTube seemingly for free… open standards or not, someone has to pay for it one way or another.

There are definitely people who will and still do pay for these things, Apple News+ or whatever is an example of news...also WSJ, NYT, Economist subscriptions...Instagram verified checkmarks. The question is how do these companies capture both the paying and non paying users...and that is through advertising. If you pay any attention, the amount of ads you watch is your payment to these companies for "free" services.

I am one of those people but this is a far cry from the days where you had to use a newspaper vending machine or walk into a video rental store. Free wasn’t really even an option.

Anyway my point is that the problem is not the lack of open standards. The problem is that we discovered how to do “free” and a lot of people prefer this way whether they want to think about it or not.

I think we got bait and switched. Initially a lot of the services used network effects to reach a peak mass and got dependency lock in(think using FB or Google as login options as an example), and then monetized through "ads or subscription", which inherently made the experience absolute crap.

I can get behind ads in moderation or subscriptions that aren't mired in dark patterns, but I feel like 30% of my time consuming anything on social media is spent on watching ads, so I just go do something else now.

I'm not really seeing your logic here. Yes, things are "free." What does this have to do with network effect driven monopolies, or open standards as a solution?

Even if this were true, this is a talking point from the beginning of the internet when there were way less people hooked to it, why does it follow that that makes anything okay? If people won’t pay for a service it’s because they really want or need it.

You’re simply making the case that these services that no one believes useful enough to pay for are controlling everything because they’re frontends for marketing agencies. This isn’t the gotcha you seem to think it is

I use plenty of services that I do really want but as long as I don’t actually have to pay for it, I won’t pay. Do I watch Disney+ or HBO or Netflix a lot sometimes? Yes. Have I ever paid for any streaming service? God no, because I always got some friend I can bum off of. And as long as I can bum, I will continue to bum.

The only things I willingly and voluntarily pay for are news and music subscriptions and that’s because I value them the most and consider them important to society but I definitely don’t necessarily use them the most.

Anyway my only point is that it has nothing with open standards. People want free and will take advertising if it means it’s free.

I use Google News because it is, imo, the best news aggregator. If it suddenly started to cost me money, I would move to something else. Eventually I would move to OTA TV stations that pay via ad revenue. If OTA TV started charging for viewership instead of ads, I would just stop looking at news. I care, but not enough to spend money. Same with Reddit, tiktok, hn, basically everything besides video games, stack overflow (which is another statement because it might drop in quality so much if it went pay that it might not be useful anymore), and cell services+home internet.

I fear it is too easy to erode open standards the way microsoft is infamous for. There is power in babel attacks (babylon languages).

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