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Comment by awhitty | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm a little high on design rhetoric right now, but I see this less in terms of Apple being a privacy/security company and more along the lines of Apple being a user-centered design company. No user wants their data shuffled around and sold, so any company that relies on the commodification of its users' data is inherently at odds with its users' needs.

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Google probably also sees themselves as user-centered by providing advanced services for free.

I think that's the "easy way out," in a way. Sure, it's not easy to provide the services for free, but it also doesn't particularly excuse them.

Like Netflix vs. YouTube. Netflix fights for your ability to stream HD videos comfortably because you pay for the service. YouTube crams a perfectly-buffered, crisp HD ad down your throat before leaving you with a video that might stutter or fail to load even at 480p. Sure, people can't complain when it's free (though they do), but I think it really limits what an experience can be, and I don't consider that particularly user-centered.

Anyway, just my thoughts.

Edit: Fixed some parallel structure

I've noticed on Youtube they seem to buffer really popular videos really well, things like Gangnam Style when it was being played probably to tens of thousands of simultaneous users were surprisingly good - I think they have some sort of really good buffered caching or something. I suspect they might do the same with adverts that they know will stay the same and know they will serve to many users.

The disconnect is there for many videos where a perfectly buffered ad precedes a slow buffering video or something, but they seem to use that technology on some user videos too I think - or something similar.

You are correct.

Due to the nature of how CDNs work the ads don't normally need special treatment.

They simply benefit from being 'very popular videos'. Meaning they stay hot in all edge caches because everyone, everywhere is watching them all the time.

The ads are all in the edge caches and the videos you want to watch might not be.

It's an absolute fallacy that Google provides services for free. In fact, it is more much more expensive:

1. The advertisers who pay google get their money from us, added to the prices of the things we buy. There is no free lunch.

2. The overhead cost of advertising is huge and we pay for that too.

3. We pay the opportunity cost of a product that cannot put users first because they live or die by giving advertisers what they want (and what we want indirectly and secondarily). This includes both the cost of lost privacy as well as well as design that optimizes advertising revenue. As has been said, we are more Google's products than we are their customers.

4. We pay the social costs. Democracy and the free market assume people make voting and purchasing decisions based on facts and reason. Advertising as predominantly about manipulation and deceit. I believe this is the most expensive cost of services that rely on advertising revenue.

Added together, we are paying a lot more for "free" web searches and email than if we could just straight up pay Google for straight-up ad-free versions.

[This is a condensed version of a more detailed case with reference links that I made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7485773]

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