4 ms·

Good lord, no. Express yourself, yes, be free from the consequences of expressing yourself- no, unless you are a child. Be entitled to compensation, no, or to

Good lord, no. Express yourself, yes, be free from the consequences of expressing yourself- no, unless you are a child. Be entitled to compensation, no, or to compel others to enter into business arrangements with you- no. There is no restriction on expression, in principle or in law. Certain private entities no longer wish to work with Mr Durden in a particular business context. He is free to find others, in fact, he may contract with his advertisers directly, which many prefer to do rather than go through an intermediary platform, like Google, that can take 70% or more when all is said and done. Or contract with his audience, which by the tone of HN comments would be delighted to pay Mr Durden directly for the value his publication provides them. Advertising has always led to the sorts of conflations of which you mistakenly speak, where the loss of an advertiser, or an advertising platform, is a restriction on freedom. No- precisely the opposite. Freedom means you are free to fuck things up for yourself, free to bear the consequences, free to make your way. Cheers.

koheripbal 6y ago
This logic breaks down when a company becomes so large as to become an international utility. ZeroHedge has no alternative to Ad-based revenues. Google is effectively a monopoly in that market. ...and think about that. That means that Google can effectively put any online news publication out of business, at will. "but hey, they can just go to news.google.com, right?" Think about the degree of power you are happily handing Google.
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  Sorry, as someone who has been in the business, this is completely false. There are plenty of alternative networks. I used to work for one. Plenty of content sites that do direct advertising. Even plenty of ways to run one's own adserver. They're open source! Yes, losing monetization through one platform is rough, but that's the algorithm. He has an audience, a valuable audience. If he can't monetize it, it's not from loss of freedom, it's from lack of brains. Furthermore, every high traffic, high value property Google drops is an opportunity for someone else. It's not handing power to Google. It's Google ceding power. Cheers.
  - koheripbal 6y ago
    What's the other online advertising provider?
    - jonahbenton 6y ago
      There are many. Advertising is a hundreds of $B, tens of thousands of companies ecosystem. Thousands of subniches. I worked at AppNexus, now Xandr, which was a platform for thousands of B2B companies, both buy- and sell-side. OpenX is another big platform. Verizon. Note that there are pipes between all of the big players, so that everyone sees a lot of everyone else's inventory. ZH is such an ideal ad property: lots of content, high rate of production, very targeted and wealthy audience- if ZH hadn't previously been doing direct deals (which are so much more lucrative for the publisher) then they are just failing at capitalism. Being dropped by Google may turn out to be a blessing. Google is an enormous player, to be sure, but Ads are not Search. Completely different business and dynamics. And ZH is still available for search. Cheers.
      - olivermarks 6y ago
        @jonahbenton I think you're missing the bigger picture here. NBC is a giant media monopoly that approached a giant S230 platform monopoly to demonetize a website's ad traffic via that S230 platform's advertising business. The plumbing of the surveillance capitalism advertising world is a detail in a much larger issue. The current siege mentality of starving out dissenting online voices, or merely voices that don't fit establishment narratives, is both undemocratic and harmful to the free speech conventions that define the free world. Tyler Durden as you probably know is a pseudonym for various writers at ZH and they also republish all sorts of other blog posts. Like most people I have mixed feelings about much of what they publish, have picked up invaluable information from their site and have questions about the Bulgarian owners, but I absolutely defend their right to publish and to not be bullied by much larger players.
        jonahbenton 6y ago
        Thanks for engaging, HN isn't a great platform for this kind of dialogue but here goes: 1. Re: NBC conglomerate angle- With respect, the "giant media monopoly" take is completely without merit. I don't work for NBC, I'm not presently working in media, I'm definitely not in the room, but the inference that there is executive level intervention on this sort of thing is, as physicists are known to say, "not even wrong." NBC at the executive level cares about its own business, growing its audience, improving its technology, growing its partnerships, its own monetization. It supports the "right" of ZeroHedge / Federalist / Daily Caller / Breitbart / Washington Examiner to monetize because if it didn't it would be counter to its own self-interest, its own need to monetize for itself. Beyond that...NBC very simply has zero leverage over the Google Ads business. Beyond the absence of motive, and the absence of leverage, whatever the hypothesized causal mechanism for such a conversation and transaction...having engaged in executive conversations between media and advertising...I don't know what to tell you. The thought that anything like it happened is fantasy. The conglomerate angle is wrong. The mental model that grants it credence is both wrong and useless, a waste of glucose. Forget it and move on. 2. Re: NBC reporter angle There was no executive level engagement, but it is not only plausible but likely that individual reporters work with various organizations/non-profits that have a mission to demonetize and discredit the right wing ecosphere garbage and its publishers. That happens all the time. There absolutely are individuals who care deeply about the peddling of that sort of bullshit and work like lawyers to find needle-in-haystack conditions under which a Terms of Service violation can be alleged. That's exactly what happened here. Most of the time it fails, but on occasion when the political waves are tilting the boat slightly in one direction or another, that may be enough for it to succeed. Doing that work is well within the bounds of a media business. Organized executive conspiracy? No, an activist individual. There are lots of them, they're called journalists. The shit that they care about is why they get into the poorly paid, thankless business of journalism. 3. "...starving out dissenting voices/don't fit establishment narrative" There is simply no "starving out" of "dissenting voices". It is precisely the opposite. It has never been easier to monetize "dissenting" garbage, to automate the production of it, and there has never been more of it. Not only from a business perspective, but politically, the Trump administration's series of attempts to use the machinery of the law to attack the business and boring process of fact finding, conventional reporting- its active measures to manufacture chaos- is exactly the opposite of a starving out. 4. "Siege mentality" While there is no defensible argument that there is a "starving out" I completely agree with the presence of the "siege mentality" in the emotional dynamics of people who make "dissenting" arguments. My own personal view is that this is just emotional immaturity. There is a science and a mechanism to human conversation, and a "dissenting" view by definition attacks that long established machinery, machinery that predates human society. Lots of other creatures have "conversations." Just about every species has power dynamics. The "dissenting view" stuff lives in those playbooks and anyone who feels "besieged" kind of just needs to grow up, put on the big boy pants, recognize what they're doing isn't new, recognize what game they're playing, etc. There is a long, long history of study of these dynamics. I go to things like Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chomsky's Manufacture of Consent, and then newer work on argumentation- Lucy Suchman comes to mind. But there are a lot, lot, lot of lenses on this. 5. Plumbing of surveillance capitalism Yeah, having worked in the space...I'm a lot less worried about this than I used to be, but it's a complex issue and too deep to go into here. From a publishing perspective, I do think the world would be better off for my definitions of "better off" if there were more subscriptions and less advertising, but everything has tradeoffs. 6. ZeroHedge itself I personally don't have a problem with ZeroHedge, most of the bullshit they publish is transparently and easily dismissed bullshit. I do find the small irony that ZH is failing to monetize effectively to be amusing. Federalist is much more skilled at pushing the antagonism button, and I think the people who work for it are engaging in systemic criminal incitement. But they are extremely skilled at staying within the ToS bounds. 7. Bigger picture There is no bigger picture in this specific story. There is no harm to "free speech." There is an ongoing battle around what constitutes "public" discourse, and it is only going to become more intense as we figure out more direct ways to pump stuff into people's brains (cf FB going big into VR and neuro). In the architecture of the western society we live in, most of the attacks on the components of informed free speech- things like facts, reality-based reports, even the recognition that there is an unforgiving reality that supercedes political BS- those attacks are (mostly) coming from the team that (mostly) claims to be suffering from them. But the loss of a sense of "objectivity" cuts multiple ways. Again, not a great platform on which to have this conversation. Happy to take it elsewhere if helpful. Cheers.
surge 6y ago
The biggest issue is that Google is also a publisher, with comment sections. It competes in the same space, and is pretty much the only game in town for advertising. This is an election year, political biases are a factor in the discussion and other sites on the other end of the political spectrum don't get their advertising removed for speech by commenters. Other sites have comment sections and has its share of trolls (from both sides) and controversial speech that targets identity groups. Does Google hold itself and other sites with that speech to the same standards? This creates an anti-trust issue. And yes, if a company has enough power to control the speech and public discourse with little other alternative is part of anti-trust, just as if there was one phone company to communicate with. There is a double standard here and a conflict of interest (not to mention they teamed up with NBC News to make this happen, another competitor). This will be used as evidence that Google should be broken up. I bet their lawyers are freaking out right now. Section 230 holds the standard that sites are not held accountable for the speech of their commenters. Corporations can censor too. The issue becomes when a corporation uses its market dominance to force another company to censor its own speech. It starts slow, but eventually it'll be any speech against Google getting censored, comments, or news articles will earn a "policy violation" with lop sided enforcement.
- jonahbenton 6y ago
  With all respect, I'm afraid that most of what you are saying is incorrect. Google is a "publisher" but not in any way that uniquely competes with ZH. No Google property takes traffic from ZH, for ZH's audience. ZH is a well known brand, long established, with huge proportion of return visitors and inbound link traffic. Google is also very much not the only game in town for advertising. They are the default choice for many publishers but there are many, many, many monetization partners, a high degree of liquidity and flexibility, and a brand as well known and with as loyal and wealthy an audience as ZH is ideal for many monetization strategies that are much more valuable than plain old Google ads. I understand the anti-trust framing and the "teamed up" with NBC business and conflict of interest and so forth, but with all respect, that amounts to conspiracy theory/faulty inference thinking. It is not reality. Google's lawyers are not concerned about any of this. Ads is just a monetization tool. Advertising is ALWAYS sensitive to messaging and reputation and issues around implied endorsements and so forth. People confuse that with speech, but it is not. It is about b2b contractual relationships with both sides being free to end them at any time. Ads are not "pipes" like ISP service (or arguably CDN). They are not search, not publishing. Just money. Cheers.

koheripbal 6y ago

This logic breaks down when a company becomes so large as to become an international utility. ZeroHedge has no alternative to Ad-based revenues. Google is effectively a monopoly in that market. ...and think about that. That means that Google can effectively put any online news publication out of business, at will. "but hey, they can just go to news.google.com, right?" Think about the degree of power you are happily handing Google.

jonahbenton 6y ago
Sorry, as someone who has been in the business, this is completely false. There are plenty of alternative networks. I used to work for one. Plenty of content sites that do direct advertising. Even plenty of ways to run one's own adserver. They're open source! Yes, losing monetization through one platform is rough, but that's the algorithm. He has an audience, a valuable audience. If he can't monetize it, it's not from loss of freedom, it's from lack of brains. Furthermore, every high traffic, high value property Google drops is an opportunity for someone else. It's not handing power to Google. It's Google ceding power. Cheers.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  What's the other online advertising provider?
  - jonahbenton 6y ago
    There are many. Advertising is a hundreds of $B, tens of thousands of companies ecosystem. Thousands of subniches. I worked at AppNexus, now Xandr, which was a platform for thousands of B2B companies, both buy- and sell-side. OpenX is another big platform. Verizon. Note that there are pipes between all of the big players, so that everyone sees a lot of everyone else's inventory. ZH is such an ideal ad property: lots of content, high rate of production, very targeted and wealthy audience- if ZH hadn't previously been doing direct deals (which are so much more lucrative for the publisher) then they are just failing at capitalism. Being dropped by Google may turn out to be a blessing. Google is an enormous player, to be sure, but Ads are not Search. Completely different business and dynamics. And ZH is still available for search. Cheers.
    - olivermarks 6y ago
      @jonahbenton I think you're missing the bigger picture here. NBC is a giant media monopoly that approached a giant S230 platform monopoly to demonetize a website's ad traffic via that S230 platform's advertising business. The plumbing of the surveillance capitalism advertising world is a detail in a much larger issue. The current siege mentality of starving out dissenting online voices, or merely voices that don't fit establishment narratives, is both undemocratic and harmful to the free speech conventions that define the free world. Tyler Durden as you probably know is a pseudonym for various writers at ZH and they also republish all sorts of other blog posts. Like most people I have mixed feelings about much of what they publish, have picked up invaluable information from their site and have questions about the Bulgarian owners, but I absolutely defend their right to publish and to not be bullied by much larger players.
      - jonahbenton 6y ago
        Thanks for engaging, HN isn't a great platform for this kind of dialogue but here goes: 1. Re: NBC conglomerate angle- With respect, the "giant media monopoly" take is completely without merit. I don't work for NBC, I'm not presently working in media, I'm definitely not in the room, but the inference that there is executive level intervention on this sort of thing is, as physicists are known to say, "not even wrong." NBC at the executive level cares about its own business, growing its audience, improving its technology, growing its partnerships, its own monetization. It supports the "right" of ZeroHedge / Federalist / Daily Caller / Breitbart / Washington Examiner to monetize because if it didn't it would be counter to its own self-interest, its own need to monetize for itself. Beyond that...NBC very simply has zero leverage over the Google Ads business. Beyond the absence of motive, and the absence of leverage, whatever the hypothesized causal mechanism for such a conversation and transaction...having engaged in executive conversations between media and advertising...I don't know what to tell you. The thought that anything like it happened is fantasy. The conglomerate angle is wrong. The mental model that grants it credence is both wrong and useless, a waste of glucose. Forget it and move on. 2. Re: NBC reporter angle There was no executive level engagement, but it is not only plausible but likely that individual reporters work with various organizations/non-profits that have a mission to demonetize and discredit the right wing ecosphere garbage and its publishers. That happens all the time. There absolutely are individuals who care deeply about the peddling of that sort of bullshit and work like lawyers to find needle-in-haystack conditions under which a Terms of Service violation can be alleged. That's exactly what happened here. Most of the time it fails, but on occasion when the political waves are tilting the boat slightly in one direction or another, that may be enough for it to succeed. Doing that work is well within the bounds of a media business. Organized executive conspiracy? No, an activist individual. There are lots of them, they're called journalists. The shit that they care about is why they get into the poorly paid, thankless business of journalism. 3. "...starving out dissenting voices/don't fit establishment narrative" There is simply no "starving out" of "dissenting voices". It is precisely the opposite. It has never been easier to monetize "dissenting" garbage, to automate the production of it, and there has never been more of it. Not only from a business perspective, but politically, the Trump administration's series of attempts to use the machinery of the law to attack the business and boring process of fact finding, conventional reporting- its active measures to manufacture chaos- is exactly the opposite of a starving out. 4. "Siege mentality" While there is no defensible argument that there is a "starving out" I completely agree with the presence of the "siege mentality" in the emotional dynamics of people who make "dissenting" arguments. My own personal view is that this is just emotional immaturity. There is a science and a mechanism to human conversation, and a "dissenting" view by definition attacks that long established machinery, machinery that predates human society. Lots of other creatures have "conversations." Just about every species has power dynamics. The "dissenting view" stuff lives in those playbooks and anyone who feels "besieged" kind of just needs to grow up, put on the big boy pants, recognize what they're doing isn't new, recognize what game they're playing, etc. There is a long, long history of study of these dynamics. I go to things like Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chomsky's Manufacture of Consent, and then newer work on argumentation- Lucy Suchman comes to mind. But there are a lot, lot, lot of lenses on this. 5. Plumbing of surveillance capitalism Yeah, having worked in the space...I'm a lot less worried about this than I used to be, but it's a complex issue and too deep to go into here. From a publishing perspective, I do think the world would be better off for my definitions of "better off" if there were more subscriptions and less advertising, but everything has tradeoffs. 6. ZeroHedge itself I personally don't have a problem with ZeroHedge, most of the bullshit they publish is transparently and easily dismissed bullshit. I do find the small irony that ZH is failing to monetize effectively to be amusing. Federalist is much more skilled at pushing the antagonism button, and I think the people who work for it are engaging in systemic criminal incitement. But they are extremely skilled at staying within the ToS bounds. 7. Bigger picture There is no bigger picture in this specific story. There is no harm to "free speech." There is an ongoing battle around what constitutes "public" discourse, and it is only going to become more intense as we figure out more direct ways to pump stuff into people's brains (cf FB going big into VR and neuro). In the architecture of the western society we live in, most of the attacks on the components of informed free speech- things like facts, reality-based reports, even the recognition that there is an unforgiving reality that supercedes political BS- those attacks are (mostly) coming from the team that (mostly) claims to be suffering from them. But the loss of a sense of "objectivity" cuts multiple ways. Again, not a great platform on which to have this conversation. Happy to take it elsewhere if helpful. Cheers.

surge 6y ago

The biggest issue is that Google is also a publisher, with comment sections. It competes in the same space, and is pretty much the only game in town for advertising. This is an election year, political biases are a factor in the discussion and other sites on the other end of the political spectrum don't get their advertising removed for speech by commenters. Other sites have comment sections and has its share of trolls (from both sides) and controversial speech that targets identity groups. Does Google hold itself and other sites with that speech to the same standards? This creates an anti-trust issue. And yes, if a company has enough power to control the speech and public discourse with little other alternative is part of anti-trust, just as if there was one phone company to communicate with. There is a double standard here and a conflict of interest (not to mention they teamed up with NBC News to make this happen, another competitor). This will be used as evidence that Google should be broken up. I bet their lawyers are freaking out right now. Section 230 holds the standard that sites are not held accountable for the speech of their commenters. Corporations can censor too. The issue becomes when a corporation uses its market dominance to force another company to censor its own speech. It starts slow, but eventually it'll be any speech against Google getting censored, comments, or news articles will earn a "policy violation" with lop sided enforcement.

jonahbenton 6y ago
With all respect, I'm afraid that most of what you are saying is incorrect. Google is a "publisher" but not in any way that uniquely competes with ZH. No Google property takes traffic from ZH, for ZH's audience. ZH is a well known brand, long established, with huge proportion of return visitors and inbound link traffic. Google is also very much not the only game in town for advertising. They are the default choice for many publishers but there are many, many, many monetization partners, a high degree of liquidity and flexibility, and a brand as well known and with as loyal and wealthy an audience as ZH is ideal for many monetization strategies that are much more valuable than plain old Google ads. I understand the anti-trust framing and the "teamed up" with NBC business and conflict of interest and so forth, but with all respect, that amounts to conspiracy theory/faulty inference thinking. It is not reality. Google's lawyers are not concerned about any of this. Ads is just a monetization tool. Advertising is ALWAYS sensitive to messaging and reputation and issues around implied endorsements and so forth. People confuse that with speech, but it is not. It is about b2b contractual relationships with both sides being free to end them at any time. Ads are not "pipes" like ISP service (or arguably CDN). They are not search, not publishing. Just money. Cheers.