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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 t

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.

fredley 7y ago
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.
- rubber_duck 7y ago
  > it puts its customers first Have you ever dealt with Google as a customer :) ?
negus 7y ago
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 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
- jolux 7y ago
  The DRM is totally different though. Not having it means certain sites can’t be used.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    And ad supporters say that not providing facilities for personalized ads means sites wouldn't be able to exist.
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      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.
    - jolux 7y ago
      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.
  - negus 7y ago
    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.
- CarelessExpert 7y ago
  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.
  - maccard 7y ago
    > 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
    - CarelessExpert 7y ago
      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.
      - not2b 7y ago
        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.
- arghwhat 7y ago
  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.
  - negus 7y ago
    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
    - gruez 7y ago
      AFAIK in firefox DRM plugins are sandboxed
- driverdan 7y ago
  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.
  - CarelessExpert 7y ago
    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.
  - ppseafield 7y ago
    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.
- rpastuszak 7y ago
  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.
  - the_gastropod 7y ago
    > 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.
    - Ensorceled 7y ago
      > 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.
      - godshatter 7y ago
        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.
phkahler 7y ago
>> 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.
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  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.
patrickaljord 7y ago
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?
- AJ007 7y ago
  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.
skybrian 7y ago
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.
- mattacular 7y ago
  > 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.
  - tarr11 7y ago
    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.
    - mtberatwork 7y ago
      I'm sure most are just ignorant as to how much information they are exchanging and not necessarily happy to provide this "by default".
      - summerlight 7y ago
        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.
cortesoft 7y ago
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.
- johnday 7y ago
  What would happen if, for example, all advertising was made illegal globally? I strongly doubt the internet would stop working.
  - AJ007 7y ago
    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.
    - mcny 7y ago
      > 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.
    - mtberatwork 7y ago
      > 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?
kmlx 7y ago
i feel this comment is a lot more hateful than helpful. i don't understand how this helps the conversation.
vbezhenar 7y ago
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.
- RockIslandLine 7y ago
  "Countless websites were broken because they used popup windows." I fixed it for you.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  > 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.

fredley 7y ago

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.

rubber_duck 7y ago
> it puts its customers first Have you ever dealt with Google as a customer :) ?

negus 7y ago

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 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

jolux 7y ago
The DRM is totally different though. Not having it means certain sites can’t be used.
- Spivak 7y ago
  And ad supporters say that not providing facilities for personalized ads means sites wouldn't be able to exist.
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    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.
  - jolux 7y ago
    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.
- negus 7y ago
  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.
CarelessExpert 7y ago
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.
- maccard 7y ago
  > 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
  - CarelessExpert 7y ago
    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.
    - not2b 7y ago
      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.
arghwhat 7y ago
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.
- negus 7y ago
  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
  - gruez 7y ago
    AFAIK in firefox DRM plugins are sandboxed
driverdan 7y ago
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.
- CarelessExpert 7y ago
  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.
- ppseafield 7y ago
  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.
rpastuszak 7y ago
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.
- the_gastropod 7y ago
  > 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.
  - Ensorceled 7y ago
    > 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.
    - godshatter 7y ago
      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.

phkahler 7y ago

>> 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.

wizzwizz4 7y ago
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.

patrickaljord 7y ago

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?

AJ007 7y ago
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.

skybrian 7y ago

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.

mattacular 7y ago
> 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.
- tarr11 7y ago
  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.
  - mtberatwork 7y ago
    I'm sure most are just ignorant as to how much information they are exchanging and not necessarily happy to provide this "by default".
    - summerlight 7y ago
      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.

cortesoft 7y ago

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.

johnday 7y ago
What would happen if, for example, all advertising was made illegal globally? I strongly doubt the internet would stop working.
- AJ007 7y ago
  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.
  - mcny 7y ago
    > 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.
  - mtberatwork 7y ago
    > 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?

kmlx 7y ago

i feel this comment is a lot more hateful than helpful. i don't understand how this helps the conversation.

vbezhenar 7y ago

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.

RockIslandLine 7y ago
"Countless websites were broken because they used popup windows." I fixed it for you.
JohnFen 7y ago
> 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.