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> We can’t just ignore online advertising - it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded Sorry no, that thinking is patently false right there.

> We can’t just ignore online advertising - it’s a major driver of how the internet works and is funded Sorry no, that thinking is patently false right there. So everything that follows is compromised. Advertising has been made a major driver, actually the only driver. It does not need to be a major driver and certainly not the only driver. And, spoiler alert, it cannot continue being a major driver. Yes, advertising is a big and varied business with at least one century of storied successes (and how exactly it is done can range from the outright immoral to various shades of ethical). But society and the economy is much, much bigger than advertising. They can easily fund (and do so continuously in a vast range of domains) the infrastructures they need to function properly. The internet is not a platform for ads. Its the digital canvas on which pretty much all of current life unfolds and will do so even more in the future. Some sort of digital advertising business will be happening in the market driven / consumerist societies that are the current form of socioeconomic organization. But it is parochial, backward looking and eventually a dead-end to continue ignoring the much more fundamental role of internet infrastructure. If Mozilla wants to continue being relevant (as I currently write this on a firefox browser, I surely hope they do) they need to escape the adtech black hole and its reality distortion field.

danaris 2y ago
So far as I can tell, the article also ignores one extremely important distinction: that between "advertising" and "targeted advertising". The ads that funded newspapers for decades were not targeted. They had no specific information about the individual readers' buying habits (as opposed to aggregate data). They had to put ads in that they felt would be the most broadly relevant to all the people reading that newspaper. So, too, with the early internet ads: they were "targeted" based on the content they were served next to. They had no information about the individual people browsing those websites. Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.
- deleted 2y ago
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- dns_snek 2y ago
  > Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive. Sadly I don't think this is true, there's still money to made by nefarious actors selling your data to other companies. For example car companies selling your behavioral data to insurance companies to increase your rates, messaging platforms and financial institutions selling your profile to airlines and ecommerce businesses to adjust their prices based on how much they think you're willing to pay, etc. The only way to stop this behavior is to make it illegal to do anything with personal data without explicit, revocable and completely optional consent. GDPR does this right, though it suffers from lack of enforcement. I hope that some day we'll look at these abuses of personal data the same way we'd look at our banks if they decided to send some of our money to insurance companies outright.
  - danaris 2y ago
    That's true—there are still some places where such data can be used, even without targeted advertising. However, from everything I can see, targeted advertising is massively broader, and if it is eliminated, a large percentage of the companies currently collecting the data will lose their primary reasons for doing so. The car, air, and insurance companies that might still want to buy it will not be enough to sustain nearly the kind of industry around collecting it that exists now. It is even very possible that the precipitous drop of money in the system will cause its collapse, even if those few industries might still prefer to have access to the data.
- ghaff 2y ago
  One codicil to your argument. Magazine advertising was very much targeted, just not at the individual level and specialty internet sites can do the same. Vogue did not run the same ads as Byte.
jfengel 2y ago
The generator of that reality distortion field is "stuff you get without money changing hands". That is an extremely powerful energy source. It's incredibly hard to find an alternative that people like anywhere near as much -- despite much effort. As Churchill said of democracy, advertising is the worst system except for all of the others. It would be great if they can come up with a good alternative that will scale to the billions of people who want stuff and dislike exchanging money. That leaves attention and ... ?
- openrisk 2y ago
  > "stuff you get without money changing hands". That is an extremely powerful energy source Indeed, and this is something we didn't know before the "move fast and break things" phase but now we do, also the side-effects. But my argument is that the stuff we get with money changing hands dwarfs the novelty of "freebies-for-data" by orders or magnitude. And for that broader economy to properly integrate into the digital age its just not possible to keep basing the internet infrastructure on adtech.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Well, I don’t have the option of walking into a store, watching some ads, and walking out of the store with whatever I want. I totally get it and some people are happy to produce online stuff without direct compensation—and a handful can attract enough cash to live on from fans. But you can bet there would be plenty of screaming on here if most content went behind hard paywalls. And people here probably on average make a lot more money than the average member of society.
    - JohnFen 2y ago
      If you're correct, and I fear that you are, then that means there's no room on the web for people like me. Which, I guess, has already been made really clear over the last couple of years. I'm not arguing against your statements here, just crying in my beer over the loss.
- pyrale 2y ago
PaulRobinson 2y ago
The line you quote is present tense, not future tense. In fact, you even agree, advertising has been made the only driver, in present and past tenses. This is correct. It is. I think we can all agree, none of us want it to be like this. The line you quote is not - and nothing else in the piece I see - a statement that Mozilla is advocating for advertising being the only driver in future. They're saying "society has chosen this model, we can't ignore it, so here's our approach on making it better". Does anything in the piece you consider "compromised", - because? What? It's compromised for accurately stating present reality? Albeit a reality we don't particularly enjoy? How is that compromised, exactly? - obstruct or block other economic drivers from becoming dominant? Does it prevent crowd funding, patronage, subscriptions or any other economic model you can think of? Sure, effort spent on making adtech less crappy means that effort is not being spent on actively promoting some other driver, so I can see lost opportunity costs here, but you haven't actually named an alternate economic model they should invest in.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  > I think we can all agree, none of us want it to be like this. Some people must want this, how else could it end up this way?
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Basically all the people that have the revealed preference that they’ll however grudgingly pay with their attention than tossing down cash for most content.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
      These people do exist, but there's also the strong friction against filling out all your personal information (including credit card info) into every or entertainment site you thought interesting and then agree to some term with auto-renewal, etc. etc. Like maybe it just had the one good article/video/recipe or whatever. This is really an unworkable solution. For a pay-per-use internet sites to work, the payment has to be cheap, easy, trustworthy, and fast. This does not yet exist.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pyrale 2y ago
> If Mozilla wants to continue being relevant (as I currently write this on a firefox browser, I surely hope they do) they need to escape the adtech black hole and its reality distortion field. Nobody is going to escape the adtech blackhole before the US govt. actually does its job and does to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and a few others what it did to Standard Oil or AT&T. We're talking about entities so tentacular and rich that they can (and did) run whatever service you provide for free for decades, just to kill you and gain control. No legitimate business can resist that.
cjpearson 2y ago
I don't like ads either, but what is the alternative? Since content costs money to produce and host, there must be a revenue source somewhere. Is the solution paywalls? Personally, I'm fine paying for some ad-free content. But Mozilla wants much of the internet to be free (as in free beer) and open, so an internet which replaces all advertising with paywalls is not their vision. Advertising without tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers sounds better than advertising with tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers. I'd love for their to be another driver, but so far nobody has come with a broadly applicable revenue model other that paying for content or viewing ads. Suggesting that "just delete advertising" without providing an alternative is feasible is patently false and everything that follows is compromised. Perhaps one day we will live in a post-capitalist utopia, but in the meantime making online advertising less shitty would be nice.
- idle_zealot 2y ago
  The world simply does not need profit-motivated online content. The internet can be a place for physical business to interact with customers and individuals/groups to share their ideas and art. None of that requires ad funding. The only thing that does require advertising for revenue (and is of any value) is reporting work, and they're struggling in the current model anyway. What great conveniences are you worried about losing? Social media sites? Forums existed without any funding but donations. Maps? OSM and Apple Maps exist. YouTube? Free video hosting is more expensive to operate than other media, but I'd bet nerds would rig up some near-seamless webtorrent protocol for embedding and sharing video with distributed load. The people making YouTube/online content? They're mostly fan-supported via patron relationships anyway. If advertising were banned overnight there would be maybe a month of readjustments, a few tech companies would have to pivot, and then life would go on but be a bit less shitty.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > Advertising without tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers sounds better than advertising with tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers. It does! But that can be achieved with contextual advertising rather than advertising that relies on spying on everybody. Also, I don't think that Mozilla's proposal eliminates the tracking and surveillance. It just makes the browser itself the one doing the tracking and surveillance.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

danaris 2y ago

So far as I can tell, the article also ignores one extremely important distinction: that between "advertising" and "targeted advertising". The ads that funded newspapers for decades were not targeted. They had no specific information about the individual readers' buying habits (as opposed to aggregate data). They had to put ads in that they felt would be the most broadly relevant to all the people reading that newspaper. So, too, with the early internet ads: they were "targeted" based on the content they were served next to. They had no information about the individual people browsing those websites. Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dns_snek 2y ago
> Ban targeted advertising, and the mass data collection loses almost all of its monetary incentive. Sadly I don't think this is true, there's still money to made by nefarious actors selling your data to other companies. For example car companies selling your behavioral data to insurance companies to increase your rates, messaging platforms and financial institutions selling your profile to airlines and ecommerce businesses to adjust their prices based on how much they think you're willing to pay, etc. The only way to stop this behavior is to make it illegal to do anything with personal data without explicit, revocable and completely optional consent. GDPR does this right, though it suffers from lack of enforcement. I hope that some day we'll look at these abuses of personal data the same way we'd look at our banks if they decided to send some of our money to insurance companies outright.
- danaris 2y ago
  That's true—there are still some places where such data can be used, even without targeted advertising. However, from everything I can see, targeted advertising is massively broader, and if it is eliminated, a large percentage of the companies currently collecting the data will lose their primary reasons for doing so. The car, air, and insurance companies that might still want to buy it will not be enough to sustain nearly the kind of industry around collecting it that exists now. It is even very possible that the precipitous drop of money in the system will cause its collapse, even if those few industries might still prefer to have access to the data.
ghaff 2y ago
One codicil to your argument. Magazine advertising was very much targeted, just not at the individual level and specialty internet sites can do the same. Vogue did not run the same ads as Byte.

jfengel 2y ago

The generator of that reality distortion field is "stuff you get without money changing hands". That is an extremely powerful energy source. It's incredibly hard to find an alternative that people like anywhere near as much -- despite much effort. As Churchill said of democracy, advertising is the worst system except for all of the others. It would be great if they can come up with a good alternative that will scale to the billions of people who want stuff and dislike exchanging money. That leaves attention and ... ?

openrisk 2y ago
> "stuff you get without money changing hands". That is an extremely powerful energy source Indeed, and this is something we didn't know before the "move fast and break things" phase but now we do, also the side-effects. But my argument is that the stuff we get with money changing hands dwarfs the novelty of "freebies-for-data" by orders or magnitude. And for that broader economy to properly integrate into the digital age its just not possible to keep basing the internet infrastructure on adtech.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Well, I don’t have the option of walking into a store, watching some ads, and walking out of the store with whatever I want. I totally get it and some people are happy to produce online stuff without direct compensation—and a handful can attract enough cash to live on from fans. But you can bet there would be plenty of screaming on here if most content went behind hard paywalls. And people here probably on average make a lot more money than the average member of society.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    If you're correct, and I fear that you are, then that means there's no room on the web for people like me. Which, I guess, has already been made really clear over the last couple of years. I'm not arguing against your statements here, just crying in my beer over the loss.
pyrale 2y ago

PaulRobinson 2y ago

The line you quote is present tense, not future tense. In fact, you even agree, advertising has been made the only driver, in present and past tenses. This is correct. It is. I think we can all agree, none of us want it to be like this. The line you quote is not - and nothing else in the piece I see - a statement that Mozilla is advocating for advertising being the only driver in future. They're saying "society has chosen this model, we can't ignore it, so here's our approach on making it better". Does anything in the piece you consider "compromised", - because? What? It's compromised for accurately stating present reality? Albeit a reality we don't particularly enjoy? How is that compromised, exactly? - obstruct or block other economic drivers from becoming dominant? Does it prevent crowd funding, patronage, subscriptions or any other economic model you can think of? Sure, effort spent on making adtech less crappy means that effort is not being spent on actively promoting some other driver, so I can see lost opportunity costs here, but you haven't actually named an alternate economic model they should invest in.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
> I think we can all agree, none of us want it to be like this. Some people must want this, how else could it end up this way?
- ghaff 2y ago
  Basically all the people that have the revealed preference that they’ll however grudgingly pay with their attention than tossing down cash for most content.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
    These people do exist, but there's also the strong friction against filling out all your personal information (including credit card info) into every or entertainment site you thought interesting and then agree to some term with auto-renewal, etc. etc. Like maybe it just had the one good article/video/recipe or whatever. This is really an unworkable solution. For a pay-per-use internet sites to work, the payment has to be cheap, easy, trustworthy, and fast. This does not yet exist.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

pyrale 2y ago

> If Mozilla wants to continue being relevant (as I currently write this on a firefox browser, I surely hope they do) they need to escape the adtech black hole and its reality distortion field. Nobody is going to escape the adtech blackhole before the US govt. actually does its job and does to Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and a few others what it did to Standard Oil or AT&T. We're talking about entities so tentacular and rich that they can (and did) run whatever service you provide for free for decades, just to kill you and gain control. No legitimate business can resist that.

cjpearson 2y ago

I don't like ads either, but what is the alternative? Since content costs money to produce and host, there must be a revenue source somewhere. Is the solution paywalls? Personally, I'm fine paying for some ad-free content. But Mozilla wants much of the internet to be free (as in free beer) and open, so an internet which replaces all advertising with paywalls is not their vision. Advertising without tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers sounds better than advertising with tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers. I'd love for their to be another driver, but so far nobody has come with a broadly applicable revenue model other that paying for content or viewing ads. Suggesting that "just delete advertising" without providing an alternative is feasible is patently false and everything that follows is compromised. Perhaps one day we will live in a post-capitalist utopia, but in the meantime making online advertising less shitty would be nice.

idle_zealot 2y ago
The world simply does not need profit-motivated online content. The internet can be a place for physical business to interact with customers and individuals/groups to share their ideas and art. None of that requires ad funding. The only thing that does require advertising for revenue (and is of any value) is reporting work, and they're struggling in the current model anyway. What great conveniences are you worried about losing? Social media sites? Forums existed without any funding but donations. Maps? OSM and Apple Maps exist. YouTube? Free video hosting is more expensive to operate than other media, but I'd bet nerds would rig up some near-seamless webtorrent protocol for embedding and sharing video with distributed load. The people making YouTube/online content? They're mostly fan-supported via patron relationships anyway. If advertising were banned overnight there would be maybe a month of readjustments, a few tech companies would have to pivot, and then life would go on but be a bit less shitty.
JohnFen 2y ago
> Advertising without tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers sounds better than advertising with tracking, surveillance and shady data brokers. It does! But that can be achieved with contextual advertising rather than advertising that relies on spying on everybody. Also, I don't think that Mozilla's proposal eliminates the tracking and surveillance. It just makes the browser itself the one doing the tracking and surveillance.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]