84% want stronger online privacy laws, but Congress's corruption stalls progress
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
I'm sure, those companies have enough smart people to figure out some way to create high-paying jobs that do not rely on invasion of privacy.
[Added] ...if only they were incentivized to do so
The companies in the S&P500 don't collapse, when I stop making regular new payments into my retirement fund.
However, it would still likely provide for decades at least. Norway distributes the returns from the fund, not the fund money itself.
Is that adjusted for inflation?
To explain, suppose I have a stock that went up 10% last year (and paid no dividends, to keep things simple). If inflation was also 10%, there was no real return from my investment, and nothing should be distributed. If inflation was 2%, my real return was about 8%, and we could distribute that without touching 'the fund money itself'.
So if regulation simply maximizes the greatest good for the greatest number of people the rules will likely end up protecting privacy.
So what we see here is that some high paying jobs create a bunch of powerful groups that lobby to keep their current jobs, ie. against stronger regulation.
The greater good for the greater number of people is a nice concept, but I don't think it has been true for much of the US's history. The thing was started with lines like 3/5 of a person included in it while totally ignoring half of the population based on gender.
The politicians know full well that many of the highest paid people in their respective districts are employees in tech. This is true across most of the US. No one, and I mean no one, is interested in becoming a new rust belt city. So politicians act to keep the money flowing and the tax coffers full so that they can then dole out projects. The doling out of projects is a necessary, some would even say foundational, basis of whatever corrupt extraction is able to be carried out.
Not unlikely? It has never been seriously discussed (e.g. because others would simply increase production to compensate). The fund would collapse? Why?
The fund wouldn't collapse, but would be severely hit , and would be entirely dependent on the valuations of tech companies over decades.
This one is closest. Said companies hire lobbyists to always be in the ear of politicians. For example, here are the recent bills that Google has lobbied on. Note that most of them are about privacy.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/clients/bills?c...
They also give large donations to politicians when they're campaigning. Or the opposition if the candidate isn't willing to play ball. This is all completely legal, as long as its disclosed.
But I don't think the OP noticed that.
Anyway, if you think Google or Facebook are good "brands" for the US, you've got way too much exposition. The Hollywood propaganda works great, that big-co one doesn't.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_valuable_brands
If that was true, people would be constantly trying to impersonate famous recent criminals you find on the news.
At the same time, we allowed the problem of economic harm to grow worse by not dealing decisively with the problem of online privacy from the outset. For this same reason, an argument could be made that ripping the bandaid off now would be less painful than in the future. (And I'm not blind to the amount of pain this would cause. I realize that what I'm advocating would decimate our own industry.)
Then on the other hand there's the argument, that has apparently found the most resonance, that letting online privacy whither on the vine is the logical way to go. Good or bad, these privacy invasions are funding a sizeable chunk of the economy. I can see people thinking it's nonsensical to get rid of 10% of the nation's jobs. Especially when it's the exact 10% of jobs likely to pay the most.
I'm a privacy advocate, so I fall on the "burn it down" side. But I do understand the other side of the argument. I just think right now, at about 10-12% of the economy, decimation of the tech industry is survivable. If we wait, it could be 20-30% of the economy, at that point, pro-privacy actions would effectively be completely off the table.
Similarly with more/less efficient advertising consumers have just as much money so total spending stays the same, so the only change is which companies capture it.
Economics 101 : There is no fixed pie of $$$$. $$ (as in wealth, productivity) can absolutely disappear from the economy or grow from nothing.
If anything it’s slightly negative due to inefficiency because the winner isn’t the best product.
To illustrate this, we start from the position that a new business creates net new value in the economy (on top of existing value). This is an economic maxim that must be true otherwise our GDP would never grow from 1770 standards.
Now, the new business has to allocate a percentage of its budget to advertising. It doesn't have a choice in the matter:
1) In a competitive market, not advertising places it at a competitive disadvantage to its rivals who are advertising.
2) In a non-competitive market, not advertising leads to a smaller overall market and a weaker position (loss of market cap and easier to disrupt).
Once the new business start advertising, other businesses become aware of it and either (a) choose to enter the market themselves, or (b) invest in advertising targeted at blocking/reducing this new market. Both cases result in more money spent on advertising. That's the multiplier effect.
You misunderstand zero sum here. Gas stations can’t grow total gas sales making the selling of gas zero sum, but they very much provide a useful function in aggregate.
Advertising is going to exist with and without tracking individual users, the difference is simply relative value of undifferentiated content. Selling camping supplies on an outdoor website is targeting, but linking user’s history allows anyone to get a cut of premium revenue even if it’s lowest common denominator crap. But remove tracking of users and specialty content like local news becomes a lot more valuable and clickbait far less, a major public good.
> we start from the position that a new business creates net new value in the economy (on top of existing value). This is an economic maxim that must be true otherwise our GDP would never grow from 1770 standards.
I understand the point you are trying to make but existing companies also evolve their offerings over time. Nintendo in 1889 wasn’t selling video games.
> Advertising is going to exist with and without tracking individual users, the difference is simply relative value of undifferentiated content.
So what you mean to say is that targeted advertising is the same as mass advertising, that there's no benefit, perceived or otherwise, of targeting users. Well, I'm afraid you're very wrong. Both buyers and sellers of advertising love targeted advertising. For buyers, it makes the most efficient use of their budget allocation, and for sellers, it allows them to to take maximum advantage of user self-segmentation. The analogy of indiscriminate bombing being superseded by precision munitions is an apt one. There's no going back at this point.
Regulations will only distort the market further. The platforms will make the fines the cost of doing business, and pass them onto the buyers. The buyers, in turn, will pass that cost along to consumers in the form of higher prices. Every company will continue to pay for advertising because they can't afford not to. And so it will continue. All the fines will do is concentrate more wealth into the platforms and the government. And that's exactly what's happening in the EU with advent of GDPR.
Your own words demonstrate the zero sum nature. During COVID YouTube had a huge spike in viewers as people stayed at home, but rates absolutely tanked because the value is defined between advertising budgets and available distribution not some inherent property of a viewer seeing an advertisement.
This is just like how gas in aggregate grows with the economy/oil prices not the efficiency of gas stations. It’s these external factors which make them zero sum.
> So what you mean to say is that targeted advertising is the same as mass advertising, that there's no benefit, perceived or otherwise, of targeting users.
No, I am saying tracking users is one of many methods to target users. The value of individual means of advertising varies, but the ability to target users doesn’t disappear when you ban tracking users. What changes is how valuable individual options are not the total value of all methods of advertising combined.
> There's no going back at this point.
Things often seem more stable than they actually are. Banning tracking is a tiny blimp compared to the kinds of changes you see after major Supreme Court decisions let alone major events like revolutions.
Yes, like a cancer.
> Both buyers and sellers of advertising love targeted advertising.
Of course they do. But that's all at the expense of everyone who isn't in the business of buying and selling advertising.
> There's no going back at this point.
We'll see. I cannot accept that being forced to live in a massive surveillance state is an inevitability.
> Regulations will only distort the market further.
Bad regulations will. However, the appearance of ubiquitous spying by marketing companies are also heavily distorting the market. The introduction of rules to correct the serious misbehavior of these companies has the potential to correct, or at least reduce, the harm.
At this point, it's pretty clear that there is no other mechanism available to us. Simply resigning ourselves to bending over and taking it is not acceptable.
To be fair, then they started investing in vape companies and things might have changed. I don't think that's a good thing, although vapes are probably less harmful than cigarettes.
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...
But more to the point, which tech company has a monopoly at all and which one is based on structural issues and not network effects and how do you propose to break them up? Better question is where is the consumer benefit of breaking up any of them and how would you slice them?
"If you dare to assert your right to privacy, thousands of people will lose their jobs!"
It relies on several layers of propaganda, and has no more basis in reality than trickle-down economics.
If there are corporations that are the world's largest by headcount or by capitalisation, i.e., "flagship" corporations, and these entities are dependent on online surveillance and online ad sales to operate in their present capacity, then certainly privacy regulation is likely going to affect them. One could argue such regulation is targeting them, i.e., the harm they do, specifically.
As a result of regulation these entities might no longer be able to maintain their position as "flagship" corporations. Other corporations that are not dependant on surveillance and ad sales for 90+% of their revenue may again become the "flagship" corporations, as they were prior to the 2010s.
The current online surveillance and online ad sales-based "flagship" coporations have only held their "flagship" positions for a relatively short time period. Arguably, the general absence of regulation governing their privacy-violating behaviour, which remarkably is the core of their "business model", has provided a competitive advantage vis-a-vis other corporations in more regulated industries. One could argue privacy regulation might effectively level the playing field.
Increasingly the debate is moving to national security. We hear that the US government has lost trust in Microsoft. In the UK the choice of GCHQ to use AWS has caused consternation. A much more complex and nuanced landscape is emerging. Two of the links in the Techdirt article reference national security issues.
National security and economic welfare of citizens are not separate. Private profit of a few global surveillance and data trading companies creates a problem that affects more than individual rights.
So even if one ignores ethics and rights and takes a purely economic perspective, one has to ask whether the damage to a nation caused by big-tech surveillance companies outweighs their net benefit to the economy.
In the past, boom and bust cycles, while causing major hardship for regular folks, would also wipe out most incumbents and monopolies, effectively resetting the economy. Modern monetary policy is designed to minimize economic shock, so that option is off the table, and has been for some time now.
If google pushed to a privacy subscription model, where you could pay for google services and have all your privacy protected, people would get mad and tell google to "bring back the free stuff!".
I'm surprised people here don't see this as plainly true. Consumers _love_ the ad-supported internet, as evidenced by the incredible success of ad-supported vs subscription supported services.
What people actually want is "Privacy protection yet the internet stays the same". Which is akin to "$50 minimum wage but society stays the same". Purely naive idealistic thinking.
Consumers also love the lottery and casinos, even though they both have a negative ROI.
Consumers think they're getting something for free, but the bill for their "free service" comes the next time they go to the store and pay $10 more, spread over dozens of items they buy every month, to pay for marginal cost of advertising.
The price is hidden so well that our lizard brains don't connect the two, that's what makes the entire scheme so effective, but it definitely isn't "free".
The real truth is that flagship corporations think this will happen. They seem to believe that tracking users is the only way to deliver ads efficiently. It's not, and there are other ways to do that, such as displaying tags in environments devoted to a given topic. But this would imply a change, and why change if you can bribe congresspeople?
> The real truth is that flagship corporations think this will happen.
The real truth is that flagship corporations want everyone else to believe this will happen. They want to do whatever they feel like unopposed, and what better way to accomplish that than making everyone think what’s best for themselves is to let the company do exactly what it wants.
Won’t somebody please think of the ~~children~~ corporations!
> That would have a ripple effect on the economy as those corporations are responsible for thousands of high-paying jobs.
Bullshit. This is the argument for “trickle-down economics” and if there’s anything the past decades have proven is that when the people at the top get more money, they keep more of it for themselves.
Oh! And don't forget the youtubers and content creators in Montana, Indiana, and Kansas.
And on and on and on.
It's not as straightforward as people think, and it reaches a whole lot further than people realize. I'm a privacy activist and have studied the issue, but I still fall on the "more privacy needed" side of the fence. Likely because I'm very much in the "burn it all down" faction of privacy advocates. However, I do understand what I'm up against. There are a lot of people who are either on the other side presently, or will be on the other side as soon as they realize their pay checks will go away as the effects of closing privacy loopholes ripple through the economy.
We have to be clear eyed here, and prepared for enormous opposition to these ideas when these issues become better understood. Which is why I say we should act now. It's like Andor said, "There will never be fewer guards than there are today." As more people gain understanding of the financial impacts, the number of people on the other side will grow.
The problem is that while 84% ( I am taking that number at face value for the time being ) say they want stronger privacy laws in aggregate, as individuals they differ on what that actually means. While this is happening, corporations and interests that are opposed to that know exactly what they want and coordinate appropriately.
Privacy needs lobbyists too , I suppose?
I am not sure at what point it breaks. Ellison famously quipped that privacy is long dead anyway.
Just the other day I learned of the Sunshine Protection Act. From the first paragraph on Wikipedia¹:
> the Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent, although several senators stated later that they would have objected if they had known that the bill could pass.
Maybe politicians are “supposed to be smarter”, but they’re not.
The ad tier of services like Hulu makes more than the paid tier.
I call it “expand the powers of justice by jury”.
Essentially, bills in congress will be litigated by representatives, in front of a judge, for a jury, and the jury ultimately casts the vote either for or against the proposed legislation.
I think this would resolve many of the issues that we are seeing in contemporary politics; mainly the negative effects of the influence of money.
The other obvious problem is jury selection. You can basically choose the outcome by selecting the "right" jury.
Because the juries are selected from random pools.
Are you truly sincere in your question regarding the ability to buy off career politicians vs random peers?
Are you aware of jury tampering laws?
> The other obvious problem is jury selection. You can basically choose the outcome by selecting the "right" jury.
I was unaware you are so passionate about reforming the current jury system.
What groups are you currently working with to improve the existing system?
I can agree there are flaws in the current system but rather than throwing my hands up in defeat I think such problems can be addressed.
How would you better address the issue from the linked article?
@11:00 > “And that, ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, is why we need courts. Whatever flaws the American justice system has, and they are legion, especially for non billionaire former presidents, it does appear to be the last place where you can’t just say whatever the fuck you want regardless of reality.”
That’s the energy I want to bring to congress.
It's like the DJ-3000 automated DJ inane chatter bot from the Simpsons
"Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns."
"How's he keep up with news like that?"
The key to actually ask people "What are you willing to give up for X"?
Are you ok being more annoyed with popups asking your permissions every time?
Are you ok with a recession in Ad-based ecosystem (merchants, ad brokers, stock market depression, fewer IPOs) that may result due to this?
Would you be OK with paying for services instead of an Ad model? (and before Virtue signaling HNers jump in, how many of you have subscribed to YouTube premium)
Any idiot will say Yes to "Do you want $1000?"
Change the question to reality "Do you want $1000, but have to pay back $1100 tomorrow?" and see the numbers drop.
Passing legislations has to deal with reality. Do lobbyists influencing law making? Yes. But the lobbyists is a necessary evil because general population will always want $1000. Lobbyists are there to remind you of the costs and prevent from populism destroying civilizations.
Edit : Expected nothing better than downvotes from massively brainwashed HNers with ZERO independent thinking. The irony isn't lost that they are the 84% ers
- Apple devices because while they are getting bad with advertising, they aren’t as bad as Google
- Hulu, Netflix, Disney, Max, Paramount+ and AppleTV as part of the bundle - ad free
- Slate podcasts, Stratechery, and Downstream
- I refuse to use any app/game that doesn’t have an option to turn off ads.
- I use an Adblocker for the rest
- I don’t use YouTube, I pay for training content when I need it.
It’s not that I’m militantly opposed to advertising morally, it ruins the enjoyment of media.
Your argument is that because the industry is massive it now shouldn't be controlled even though it can be harmful because it might increase costs, or it might create annoyances.
Try to apply the same argument to other industries which are regulated due to their potential harm to see how flimsy this argument is. Food could be much cheaper if there were few regulations on quality control, cars could be much cheaper if safety devices weren't required.
> Are you ok with a recession in Ad-based ecosystem (merchants, ad brokers, stock market depression, fewer IPOs) that may result due to this?
Totally ok, it will free up brilliant minds working on this to figure out new, and potentially better ways that fit into a more privacy-focused regulatory framework.
> Edit : Expected nothing better than downvotes from massively brainwashed HNers with ZERO independent thinking. The irony isn't lost that they are the 84% ers
Refrain from this bullshit here.
What? We have different views on lobbyism. I think it should be forbidden for companies to lobby
Funny how that works.
No, I’m really not. The EU regulation that caused every site to have a stupid cookie pop-up/banner has made the Web a significantly poorer experience.
If this is the way that the flagship sites for the EU are going to do it and show how to be in compliance with the law, any other approach is too risky to implement.
There is no way the current bench on the Supreme Court of the United States of America does any sort of interpreting towards a stronger administrative state, regardless of popular support for it.
MPs, MPPs, MLAs, etc., that belong to a party typically don't deviate from the party line, even if it means going against their own constituents' wishes and interests, especially for prominent issues.
A party typically has a member who acts as what's called the "party whip", and whose role is to ensure the rest of the party's members vote as the party wishes them to, and to punish those who might not.
Voting against one's own party doesn't guarantee that that a representative will be kicked out of caucus, but it certainly has resulted in expulsions in the past (Nunziata, Casey, and Karahalios are cases I can think of off the top of my head).
I think it's reasonable to believe that Canadian politicians represent their party and themselves to a greater degree than they represent their constituents.