4 ms·

I agree with you, but there's also a business model aspect I think you're missing. Your ISP might be interested in monetizing your personal data to add to the

I agree with you, but there's also a business model aspect I think you're missing. Your ISP might be interested in monetizing your personal data to add to the ways they make money, but for companies like Google and Facebook, making money from your personal data is basically their entire business model. Given enough opposition, Verizon, Comcast, etc, could strongly embrace personal data privacy and still continue as companies. Yes, they'd lose a business opportunity, but they still make a lot of money selling you internet access and that wouldn't go away. The same is not really true of companies like Google or Facebook. Collecting and making money off your personal data is the foundation of their business. Strongly protecting your privacy would require them to change their entire way of making money. I think you could argue either way whether Google or Verizon has more ability to spy on you, but Google absolutely has a stronger business motivation to collect your data than Verizon does.

weej 9y ago
I agree with you, but there is one key difference...you are paying your ISP for the service. Google, FB, etc. provide free service offerring in exchange for your data. If ISPs are going to monetize customers traffic then their terms of use better damn well call that out. There is potential here for new business model for privacy based ISPs (ex: think duckduckgo for ISP) where customers pay a premium for such an offering.
- jiveturkey 9y ago
  No there isn’t. Where in the world can you select your ISP? in a meaningful way.
  - qaq 9y ago
    If this is a serious question in Kiev I had a choice of 4 high speed providers at a cost of about 1/10 what equivalent xfinity service is costing me here :)
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I have three major ISPs available where I live that can over 100+ meg service.
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Four here (Portuguese city near Lisbon) offering at least 250mbps.
  - swsieber 9y ago
    Not the U.S, that's for sure. But from what I've heard practically anywhere in Europe, and definitely in Japan.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      yeah in Japan you have major net providers and there is even a difference between the network you rent and the ISP. For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line.
      - leetcrew 9y ago
        > For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line as an american living in a major city, this exceeds my wildest dreams of internet service.
        oarsinsync 9y ago
        It's the difference between a regulated pro-consumer free market, and a lobbyist controlled market presenting a duopoly as a free market. It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful.
        ekianjo 9y ago
        > It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful. Well regulation can be harmful if it protects the incumbents and prevents the introduction of new players. Lobbyists are usually pushing for more regulation, not the opposite. It's not about regulation or not regulation, it's about what kind of regulation makes sense for a free market.
        rayiner 9y ago
        The difference is that NTT lost money for years offering wholesale fiber below cost: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.489.3371&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.489... (pages 11, 16). It could do that because it has a national near-monopoly in the wholesale space (it get some money from every subscriber, no matter what ISP they use), Japan's economy offers much lower returns than the U.S.'s (making low return infrastructure investments relatively more attractive), and NTT is 1/3 owned by the government (which ordered it to deploy fiber, regardless of profits).
  - maljx 9y ago
    pretty much everywhere in europe.
  - blackoil 9y ago
    In India, most metro have 2-3 broadband providers, and most of country have 4-6 mobile internet provider.
  - mantas 9y ago
    Your random eastern european country? My apartment complex is wired by at least 2 ISPs. If I don't feel like using any of them, LTE-for-home boxes are available for reasonable price with reasonable data caps from a couple other ISPs.
- maljx 9y ago
  bahnhof.se is an example of this. (swedish isp).
- chiefalchemist 9y ago
  Do you need an ISP? How about a preconfigured router / modem that uses a privacy-minded DNS + VPS? My parents and most of my friends for example wouldn't know how to do any of that. Mind you many of them have no idea, but as their goto I could make a smart recommendation and they would likely follow. Oh! And package it with a better than average 2FA. Maybe a Yubikey or similar. More or less sec in a box. Perhaps not 100% complete and bulletproof but better than the current situation.
delbel 9y ago
There was an ISP called NetZero that used this business model to provide free dial up and I think later on, free DSL in the 2000s. So this isn't a new concept, except what everyone is saying they (the ISPs) are now doing it without any kind of exchange of value apparently.
- bobwaycott 9y ago
  Oh, man, I remember NetZero. Hadn’t thought about them in ages. There was another similar company called Juno, iirc. I almost miss the days of free dialup services—where I explicitly chose to see ads in exchange for a free service, and the company was upfront that this was the exchange being performed.
  - paulie_a 9y ago
    I used both of those services and it is really amazing that the quality of ads from Google and Facebook 16+ years later is pretty much the same as NetZero/juno
kristianc 9y ago
> The same is not really true of companies like Google or Facebook. Collecting and making money off your personal data is the foundation of their business. Strongly protecting your privacy would require them to change their entire way of making money. For Facebook maybe, but Google was a large and successful business before its 'personalized' targeting was really that advanced. AdWords ran for a full four years without any kind of search personalization, and up until 2012, it was possible to turn off search personalization entirely. Google made $37bn in 2011. [1] Google Display Network, the area of Google's business that would most obviously be disrupted by a move toward strong user privacy, only makes a fraction of that still. [2] While I completely agree that Facebook would struggle without behavioral targeting, being able to buy ads on a PPC basis for users with 'intent' will always be a valuable product for advertisers, regardless of targeting. [1] https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/23/google-revenues https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/23/google-revenue... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266245/advertising-revenue-of-google-network-sites/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266245/advertising-reven...
- mtgx 9y ago
  Indeed. Google never really had to go this "ultra-targeted ads" approach. Perhaps it's the difference between Google making $30 billion in profit a year and "only" $10 billion in profit a year, and the difference between them mainly sticking to the search business and them paying for all of these failed projects like the $12 billion Motorola acquisition, Boston Dynamics, (even Nest, I'd say), and so on. But as a company it never really needed to do those. Heck, Google doesn't even need to be in the self-driving business. I think it's a failure of competition and anti-trust laws that companies are allowed to grow this big to get their fingers into all the pies out there. The only reason they even go into all of these different industries is because they've made so much money they don't know what to do with it. Sooner or later we're going to have to deal with this rampant increase in monopolies and we'll have to take some drastic measures to do it. We may even have to break-up companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, Comcast, Disney, Goldman Sachs, and others, because they were never supposed to turn into such large conglomerates. The fact that they did was a failure of competition laws to stop them from growing this big in the first place. Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon are now allowed to spy on you, then buy media and ad companies, and then use that data to manipulate you for political purposes so you end-up voting for the candidates that will help them further consolidate their power. We should have put a stop to that along the way.

weej 9y ago

I agree with you, but there is one key difference...you are paying your ISP for the service. Google, FB, etc. provide free service offerring in exchange for your data. If ISPs are going to monetize customers traffic then their terms of use better damn well call that out. There is potential here for new business model for privacy based ISPs (ex: think duckduckgo for ISP) where customers pay a premium for such an offering.

jiveturkey 9y ago
No there isn’t. Where in the world can you select your ISP? in a meaningful way.
- qaq 9y ago
  If this is a serious question in Kiev I had a choice of 4 high speed providers at a cost of about 1/10 what equivalent xfinity service is costing me here :)
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I have three major ISPs available where I live that can over 100+ meg service.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Four here (Portuguese city near Lisbon) offering at least 250mbps.
- swsieber 9y ago
  Not the U.S, that's for sure. But from what I've heard practically anywhere in Europe, and definitely in Japan.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    yeah in Japan you have major net providers and there is even a difference between the network you rent and the ISP. For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line.
    - leetcrew 9y ago
      > For example you can be on a NTT fiber line but use a different ISP on that line as an american living in a major city, this exceeds my wildest dreams of internet service.
      - oarsinsync 9y ago
        It's the difference between a regulated pro-consumer free market, and a lobbyist controlled market presenting a duopoly as a free market. It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful.
        ekianjo 9y ago
        > It's one of the negative consequences of mainstream media / political free market rhetoric considering regulation harmful. Well regulation can be harmful if it protects the incumbents and prevents the introduction of new players. Lobbyists are usually pushing for more regulation, not the opposite. It's not about regulation or not regulation, it's about what kind of regulation makes sense for a free market.
        rayiner 9y ago
        The difference is that NTT lost money for years offering wholesale fiber below cost: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.489.3371&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.489... (pages 11, 16). It could do that because it has a national near-monopoly in the wholesale space (it get some money from every subscriber, no matter what ISP they use), Japan's economy offers much lower returns than the U.S.'s (making low return infrastructure investments relatively more attractive), and NTT is 1/3 owned by the government (which ordered it to deploy fiber, regardless of profits).
- maljx 9y ago
  pretty much everywhere in europe.
- blackoil 9y ago
  In India, most metro have 2-3 broadband providers, and most of country have 4-6 mobile internet provider.
- mantas 9y ago
  Your random eastern european country? My apartment complex is wired by at least 2 ISPs. If I don't feel like using any of them, LTE-for-home boxes are available for reasonable price with reasonable data caps from a couple other ISPs.
maljx 9y ago
bahnhof.se is an example of this. (swedish isp).
chiefalchemist 9y ago
Do you need an ISP? How about a preconfigured router / modem that uses a privacy-minded DNS + VPS? My parents and most of my friends for example wouldn't know how to do any of that. Mind you many of them have no idea, but as their goto I could make a smart recommendation and they would likely follow. Oh! And package it with a better than average 2FA. Maybe a Yubikey or similar. More or less sec in a box. Perhaps not 100% complete and bulletproof but better than the current situation.

delbel 9y ago

There was an ISP called NetZero that used this business model to provide free dial up and I think later on, free DSL in the 2000s. So this isn't a new concept, except what everyone is saying they (the ISPs) are now doing it without any kind of exchange of value apparently.

bobwaycott 9y ago
Oh, man, I remember NetZero. Hadn’t thought about them in ages. There was another similar company called Juno, iirc. I almost miss the days of free dialup services—where I explicitly chose to see ads in exchange for a free service, and the company was upfront that this was the exchange being performed.
- paulie_a 9y ago
  I used both of those services and it is really amazing that the quality of ads from Google and Facebook 16+ years later is pretty much the same as NetZero/juno

kristianc 9y ago

> The same is not really true of companies like Google or Facebook. Collecting and making money off your personal data is the foundation of their business. Strongly protecting your privacy would require them to change their entire way of making money. For Facebook maybe, but Google was a large and successful business before its 'personalized' targeting was really that advanced. AdWords ran for a full four years without any kind of search personalization, and up until 2012, it was possible to turn off search personalization entirely. Google made $37bn in 2011. [1] Google Display Network, the area of Google's business that would most obviously be disrupted by a move toward strong user privacy, only makes a fraction of that still. [2] While I completely agree that Facebook would struggle without behavioral targeting, being able to buy ads on a PPC basis for users with 'intent' will always be a valuable product for advertisers, regardless of targeting. [1] https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/23/google-revenues https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/01/23/google-revenue... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266245/advertising-revenue-of-google-network-sites/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266245/advertising-reven...

mtgx 9y ago
Indeed. Google never really had to go this "ultra-targeted ads" approach. Perhaps it's the difference between Google making $30 billion in profit a year and "only" $10 billion in profit a year, and the difference between them mainly sticking to the search business and them paying for all of these failed projects like the $12 billion Motorola acquisition, Boston Dynamics, (even Nest, I'd say), and so on. But as a company it never really needed to do those. Heck, Google doesn't even need to be in the self-driving business. I think it's a failure of competition and anti-trust laws that companies are allowed to grow this big to get their fingers into all the pies out there. The only reason they even go into all of these different industries is because they've made so much money they don't know what to do with it. Sooner or later we're going to have to deal with this rampant increase in monopolies and we'll have to take some drastic measures to do it. We may even have to break-up companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, Comcast, Disney, Goldman Sachs, and others, because they were never supposed to turn into such large conglomerates. The fact that they did was a failure of competition laws to stop them from growing this big in the first place. Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon are now allowed to spy on you, then buy media and ad companies, and then use that data to manipulate you for political purposes so you end-up voting for the candidates that will help them further consolidate their power. We should have put a stop to that along the way.