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I wish we could just ban advertising and tracking on the internet. I feel like so much crap these days has come out of it, all so that CEOs can afford an extra

I wish we could just ban advertising and tracking on the internet. I feel like so much crap these days has come out of it, all so that CEOs can afford an extra yacht

crowcroft 1y ago
The question is how do you ban it, and then how do you prove that people are breaking those rules?
- fsflover 1y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
  - crowcroft 1y ago
    I like the idea, but where do you draw the line on what advertising is. Is affiliate marketing still allowed? Are influencers allowed to take payment? Can people be a spokesperson for a company? Can newspapers run commentary about businesses? Can companies pay to be vendors at a conference? No matter where you end up drawing the line you’re just shifting the problems somewhere else. Look at the amount of money Meta and Google make, the incentive is just too large.
- voidUpdate 1y ago
  I know. It's wishful thinking that will never become a reality. I pray for a solarpunk future in the same way
- numpad0 1y ago
  By defining the $thing, banning the $thing per definition by law, and then tasking FBI-like organization enforce the law? It won't completely go away but it will subside, like how gambling on Internet is divided binary and confined into lootbox games without cashing features and straight up scam underground casinos. Personally I think we should start from separating good old ads(that existed before I was 15) and Internet "ads". The old ads were still somewhat heavily targeted, but less than it is now. There probably would be an agreeable line up to which level advertisement efforts can be perverted.
  - the_sleaze_ 1y ago
    Yes - although I disagree on one point. All we need to do is define the $thing and mandate that lawsuits can be effective. No agency enforces that potato chips need to fill up 92% of the bag or whatever, or that McDonalds cannot show pictures of apple fritters with more apples than they actually come with (this happened). You just incentivize a cottage industry of legal that can squeeze a profit out of suing peanut butter companies for labelling incorrectly, or advertising dishonestly and it sort of takes care of itself.
  - crowcroft 1y ago
    I mean the comparison of ‘old’ ads vs new ads is interesting in itself, old ads already abide by far more regulation and are far more auditable. Simply bringing digital ads in line would be a big step forward. Some examples: In most countries it’s illegal to ‘target minors’ and there’s restrictions on what ads can run on after school hours. Meta has always allowed age targeting down to 13 and has no time of day restrictions. In parts of New Zealand you can’t advertise alcohol between 10PM and 9AM… unless you do it on Meta or Google. Most countries have regulation about promoting casinos (or the inability to) unless they’re digital casinos being promoted in digital ads. Or just look at the deepfake finance and crypto ads that run on Meta and X. Meta requires 24 strikes against an advertiser before they pull them down, if a TV network ran just one ad like that it would be a scandal. Audit-ability is the biggest issue imo. If a TV ad runs we can all see it at the same time and know it ran. That is simply impossible with digital ads, and even when Meta releases some tools for auditing the caveat is that you still have to trust what they’re releasing. Similarly with data protection there’s no way to truly audit what they’re doing unless you install government agencies in the companies to provide oversight, and I don’t see how you could really make that work.
    - voidUpdate 1y ago
      It would be nice if they also couldn't target us with more information than what we consent to give them. Like, fine, if you want to target facebook ads at people using details they've filled in, I can see that being acceptable, but trying to scrape every single byte of data about us and using that to throw targeted ads at us feels icky. Better moderation of crappy AI-generated image ads that are just scamming you would be nice as well.
- lucianbr 1y ago
  I think the main problem is lots of money are made from it, and money influences politics hugely. The technical difficulties are low on the list of reasons this is not happening.
pseudocomposer 1y ago
The deprecation of third-party cookies, that all browsers were at one point on track to implement, was pretty much the most realistic first step to that. Which is why Google killed it last year by leveraging their control over Chrome. While not technically a crime, it was a disgusting, unethical market manipulation move that never really got the public outrage it deserved. Google execs’ initial support for it was also telling: leadership at Google must literally thought they would find another way to stay as profitable as they are without third-party cookies. Put another way: Google leadership didn’t understand cookies as well as someone who’s taken a single undergrad web dev class. (Or they were lying all along, and always planned to “renege” on third-party cookie deprecation.)
- footlose_3815 1y ago
  Insidiously calling it "Privacy sandbox", and now setting everything opt-in every time I login to Chrome is really not Googly.
- IggleSniggle 1y ago
  I don't think that's quite what happened. Google got in anti-trust trouble because they have an unfair advantage in user-tracking, given logged in Chrome accounts. Removing third-party cookies hurts other privacy-invading companies without substantially affecting Google. It was still somewhat on track to be removed from Chrome until they lost their antitrust battle, and Chrome was required to be spun off. With Chrome's new future, and Google's new legal constraints, there's less incentive to try and make Privacy Sandbox work. At least, that was my understanding; I didn't follow it all that closely.
- skybrian 1y ago
  Most commenters on Hacker News hated Google’s plan and hoped it would fail. Were they wrong? It seems like damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t.
  - threecheese 1y ago
    That stemmed from “dammit Google now every SaaS developer has to work nights to meet your arbitrary deadline”; here we’re caring more about the impact as consumers. It’s ok to think about things in two ways. source: a developer who actually did have to do this (and did it, and now didn’t have to, but it’s done)
Workaccount2 1y ago
>all so that CEOs can afford an extra yacht ...and so consumers can use services/products without having to fork over money. People love the ad-model. Given the option to pay or use the "ad-supported" option, the ad-supported one wins 10 to 1. This means in many cases it doesn't even make sense to have a paid option, because the ad option is just so much more popular. As bad as crypto is, with all the negative things attached to it, BAT was probably one of the smartest things to be invented. A browser token that automatically dispenses micropayments to websites you visit. Forget all the details to get snagged on, the basic premise is solid: Pay for what you use. You become the customer, not the advertisers. Also a note about ad-blocking - it only makes the problem worse. It is not a "stick it to the man" protest. You protest things by boycotting them, or paying their competitors, not by using them without compensating them.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  I really liked the concept of BAT but the reality left me wanting. Things like "we'll hang on to the tokens of sites that don't use BAT yet for them until they join" gave negative vibes. It all felt a little underbaked. I swing back to Brave once in a blue moon and then remember I've got at least $20's worth of BAT lost forever somewhere.
  - Workaccount2 1y ago
    I'm not a big fan of it or anything, it's just the only crypto I know that was targeting that idea. I'd love if there was another one that was totally open and just a browser extension away. But I do not think it would ever get off the ground because... People love the ad model and hate paying for things.
- SecretDreams 1y ago
  Yes, we need ads for a free internet, today. And, as a result, we also have our privacy eroded - eroded in ways we may not care about today, but will probably regret tomorrow. If we must pay for the internet, give me an option to pay to use it where I see no ads and my privacy is preserved. Let me know what that cost is and I'll decide what I want to do. Right now, the actual pricing is obscured so we just "accept" that the internet in its current form is how it needs to be.
fuzzfactor 1y ago
This type of thing is pure greed, completely distinct from a highly aggressive pursuit of far more lucrative opportunities that average businessmen have been able to accomplish in the extreme interest of their shareholders. Those true leaders are the traditional examples who have shown success over the centuries, without letting any greed whatsoever become a dominant force, recognizing and moving in the opposite direction from those driven by overblown self-interest, who naturally have little else to offer. It can be really disgraceful these days but people don't seem to care any more. That's one thing that made them average businessmen though. Now if you're below-average I understand, but most companies' shareholders would be better off with a non-greedy CEO, who outperforms by steering away from underhanded low-class behavior instead. Now if greed is the only thing on the table, and somebody like a CEO or decision-making executive hammers away using his only little tool with admirable perseverance long enough, it does seem to have a likelihood of bringing in money that would not have otherwise come in. This can be leveraged too, by sometimes even greedier forces. All you can do is laugh, those shareholders might be satisfied, but just imagine what an average person could do with that kind of resources. It would put the greedy cretins to shame on their own terms. And if you could find an honest above-average CEO, woo hoo !
Hilift 1y ago
Reddit has fairly extensive device fingerprinting. And they are selling data for training AI models. It's only a matter of time before there is some premium phone app that monetizes data that otherwise isn't available/for sale.
udev4096 1y ago
It's impossible and we all know it. Instead, donate or help with the huge adblock lists that are being maintained by a lot of people
- kbenson 1y ago
  A lot of things I would have previously said were impossible have happened in the last half year. If only a few of those things were of the impossibly good type.
- voidUpdate 1y ago
  As said in a reply to a sibling comment, I am very aware. This is wishful thinking
dan15 1y ago
The majority of internet users are either unwilling or unable to pay for content, and so far advertising has been the best business model to allow these users to access content without paying. Do you have a better suggestion?
- FuckButtons 1y ago
  Sure, this entire business model has been cataclysmic for traditional media organizations and news outlets and peoples trust in institutions has plummeted in correlation, so, let’s just fucking scrap it and go back to payed media.
  - geoffpado 1y ago
    "Traditional media organizations" have been primarily funded by advertising longer than anyone on HN has been alive.
    - saagarjha 1y ago
      Some of them; perhaps even a vast majority. But this isn't the only option nor do we have to continue for it to be so.
      - _Algernon_ 1y ago
        Manufacturing consent identified advertisement as one of its five filters and was published in 1988. It is and was extremely rare for a magazine or news paper to not be at least partially funded by advertisements.
- bandrami 1y ago
  I don't pay for network TV but it still gets produced
  - thevinter 1y ago
    And it is funded by ads, what's your point?
bandrami 1y ago
I don't think it has to go that far. I think there's a middle ground here that people would accept: show us ads, but make it a one-way firehose, like TV and billboards. If you need to advertise to pay for the site, put up all the banners you want. But don't try to single me out for a specific one. If it could pay for network TV there's no reason it can't pay for a website. (You could still do audience-level tracking, e.g. "Facbebook and NCIS are both for old people, so advertise cruises and geriatric health services on those properties")
- kgwxd 1y ago
  We have those one-way firehose online too. They're not mutually exclusive methods. Nothing short of legislation will stop the current norms.
nedt 1y ago
It's already enough to just have plain ads. Like we have them on the streets, at the bus station, newspapers, etc. No tracking needed at all, just give out the message. If you need to target people to it in the context of the place or content you are showing it with. But you don't need to know anything about the user seeing the ad. Targeting by user doesn't work anyway.
- gbalduzzi 1y ago
  > Targeting by user doesn't work anyway. How did you reach this conclusion? The main problem is that it works way better than traditional marketing medium. It's the reason Google and Facebook are so massive, why would publishers choose to pay them if it doesn't work?
  - Doxin 1y ago
    > why would publishers choose to pay them if it doesn't work? Because they believe it works and it's impossible to prove otherwise?
  - throwanem 1y ago
    By the same logic cigarettes are presumptively beneficial...
    - lynx97 1y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESoYS9SZW-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESoYS9SZW-4
  - nedt 1y ago
    I've seen it being used. Like on the frontend side with Facebook which thinks if I'm interested into cycling I will also be interested in cars (both are on the street, right?) or if I'm interested in some more dirty humor I also want to see more "naughty" stuff. And also on the backend used by magazines and they mostly don't use the user profiles because it's too targeted and doesn't have enough audience. And if you make the targeting broad enough you'll have again people interested in chocolate so you target them with wine and whiskey. Or even better on Amazon where you can buy a new TV and when you have done so it will suggest you even more TVs for the next months.
burnt-resistor 1y ago
The problem is their greed is unlimited and their power/influence and purchasing power is relative to all of the other billionaires corrupting government and making every little facet of life of ordinary people more expensive, miserable, transactional, and punitive.

I wish we could just ban advertising and tracking on the internet. I feel like so much crap these days has come out of it, all so that CEOs can afford an extra yacht

crowcroft 1y ago

The question is how do you ban it, and then how do you prove that people are breaking those rules?

fsflover 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
- crowcroft 1y ago
  I like the idea, but where do you draw the line on what advertising is. Is affiliate marketing still allowed? Are influencers allowed to take payment? Can people be a spokesperson for a company? Can newspapers run commentary about businesses? Can companies pay to be vendors at a conference? No matter where you end up drawing the line you’re just shifting the problems somewhere else. Look at the amount of money Meta and Google make, the incentive is just too large.
voidUpdate 1y ago
I know. It's wishful thinking that will never become a reality. I pray for a solarpunk future in the same way
numpad0 1y ago
By defining the $thing, banning the $thing per definition by law, and then tasking FBI-like organization enforce the law? It won't completely go away but it will subside, like how gambling on Internet is divided binary and confined into lootbox games without cashing features and straight up scam underground casinos. Personally I think we should start from separating good old ads(that existed before I was 15) and Internet "ads". The old ads were still somewhat heavily targeted, but less than it is now. There probably would be an agreeable line up to which level advertisement efforts can be perverted.
- the_sleaze_ 1y ago
  Yes - although I disagree on one point. All we need to do is define the $thing and mandate that lawsuits can be effective. No agency enforces that potato chips need to fill up 92% of the bag or whatever, or that McDonalds cannot show pictures of apple fritters with more apples than they actually come with (this happened). You just incentivize a cottage industry of legal that can squeeze a profit out of suing peanut butter companies for labelling incorrectly, or advertising dishonestly and it sort of takes care of itself.
- crowcroft 1y ago
  I mean the comparison of ‘old’ ads vs new ads is interesting in itself, old ads already abide by far more regulation and are far more auditable. Simply bringing digital ads in line would be a big step forward. Some examples: In most countries it’s illegal to ‘target minors’ and there’s restrictions on what ads can run on after school hours. Meta has always allowed age targeting down to 13 and has no time of day restrictions. In parts of New Zealand you can’t advertise alcohol between 10PM and 9AM… unless you do it on Meta or Google. Most countries have regulation about promoting casinos (or the inability to) unless they’re digital casinos being promoted in digital ads. Or just look at the deepfake finance and crypto ads that run on Meta and X. Meta requires 24 strikes against an advertiser before they pull them down, if a TV network ran just one ad like that it would be a scandal. Audit-ability is the biggest issue imo. If a TV ad runs we can all see it at the same time and know it ran. That is simply impossible with digital ads, and even when Meta releases some tools for auditing the caveat is that you still have to trust what they’re releasing. Similarly with data protection there’s no way to truly audit what they’re doing unless you install government agencies in the companies to provide oversight, and I don’t see how you could really make that work.
  - voidUpdate 1y ago
    It would be nice if they also couldn't target us with more information than what we consent to give them. Like, fine, if you want to target facebook ads at people using details they've filled in, I can see that being acceptable, but trying to scrape every single byte of data about us and using that to throw targeted ads at us feels icky. Better moderation of crappy AI-generated image ads that are just scamming you would be nice as well.
lucianbr 1y ago
I think the main problem is lots of money are made from it, and money influences politics hugely. The technical difficulties are low on the list of reasons this is not happening.

pseudocomposer 1y ago

The deprecation of third-party cookies, that all browsers were at one point on track to implement, was pretty much the most realistic first step to that. Which is why Google killed it last year by leveraging their control over Chrome. While not technically a crime, it was a disgusting, unethical market manipulation move that never really got the public outrage it deserved. Google execs’ initial support for it was also telling: leadership at Google must literally thought they would find another way to stay as profitable as they are without third-party cookies. Put another way: Google leadership didn’t understand cookies as well as someone who’s taken a single undergrad web dev class. (Or they were lying all along, and always planned to “renege” on third-party cookie deprecation.)

footlose_3815 1y ago
Insidiously calling it "Privacy sandbox", and now setting everything opt-in every time I login to Chrome is really not Googly.
IggleSniggle 1y ago
I don't think that's quite what happened. Google got in anti-trust trouble because they have an unfair advantage in user-tracking, given logged in Chrome accounts. Removing third-party cookies hurts other privacy-invading companies without substantially affecting Google. It was still somewhat on track to be removed from Chrome until they lost their antitrust battle, and Chrome was required to be spun off. With Chrome's new future, and Google's new legal constraints, there's less incentive to try and make Privacy Sandbox work. At least, that was my understanding; I didn't follow it all that closely.
skybrian 1y ago
Most commenters on Hacker News hated Google’s plan and hoped it would fail. Were they wrong? It seems like damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t.
- threecheese 1y ago
  That stemmed from “dammit Google now every SaaS developer has to work nights to meet your arbitrary deadline”; here we’re caring more about the impact as consumers. It’s ok to think about things in two ways. source: a developer who actually did have to do this (and did it, and now didn’t have to, but it’s done)

Workaccount2 1y ago

>all so that CEOs can afford an extra yacht ...and so consumers can use services/products without having to fork over money. People love the ad-model. Given the option to pay or use the "ad-supported" option, the ad-supported one wins 10 to 1. This means in many cases it doesn't even make sense to have a paid option, because the ad option is just so much more popular. As bad as crypto is, with all the negative things attached to it, BAT was probably one of the smartest things to be invented. A browser token that automatically dispenses micropayments to websites you visit. Forget all the details to get snagged on, the basic premise is solid: Pay for what you use. You become the customer, not the advertisers. Also a note about ad-blocking - it only makes the problem worse. It is not a "stick it to the man" protest. You protest things by boycotting them, or paying their competitors, not by using them without compensating them.

rkomorn 1y ago
I really liked the concept of BAT but the reality left me wanting. Things like "we'll hang on to the tokens of sites that don't use BAT yet for them until they join" gave negative vibes. It all felt a little underbaked. I swing back to Brave once in a blue moon and then remember I've got at least $20's worth of BAT lost forever somewhere.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  I'm not a big fan of it or anything, it's just the only crypto I know that was targeting that idea. I'd love if there was another one that was totally open and just a browser extension away. But I do not think it would ever get off the ground because... People love the ad model and hate paying for things.
SecretDreams 1y ago
Yes, we need ads for a free internet, today. And, as a result, we also have our privacy eroded - eroded in ways we may not care about today, but will probably regret tomorrow. If we must pay for the internet, give me an option to pay to use it where I see no ads and my privacy is preserved. Let me know what that cost is and I'll decide what I want to do. Right now, the actual pricing is obscured so we just "accept" that the internet in its current form is how it needs to be.

fuzzfactor 1y ago

This type of thing is pure greed, completely distinct from a highly aggressive pursuit of far more lucrative opportunities that average businessmen have been able to accomplish in the extreme interest of their shareholders. Those true leaders are the traditional examples who have shown success over the centuries, without letting any greed whatsoever become a dominant force, recognizing and moving in the opposite direction from those driven by overblown self-interest, who naturally have little else to offer. It can be really disgraceful these days but people don't seem to care any more. That's one thing that made them average businessmen though. Now if you're below-average I understand, but most companies' shareholders would be better off with a non-greedy CEO, who outperforms by steering away from underhanded low-class behavior instead. Now if greed is the only thing on the table, and somebody like a CEO or decision-making executive hammers away using his only little tool with admirable perseverance long enough, it does seem to have a likelihood of bringing in money that would not have otherwise come in. This can be leveraged too, by sometimes even greedier forces. All you can do is laugh, those shareholders might be satisfied, but just imagine what an average person could do with that kind of resources. It would put the greedy cretins to shame on their own terms. And if you could find an honest above-average CEO, woo hoo !

Hilift 1y ago

Reddit has fairly extensive device fingerprinting. And they are selling data for training AI models. It's only a matter of time before there is some premium phone app that monetizes data that otherwise isn't available/for sale.

udev4096 1y ago

It's impossible and we all know it. Instead, donate or help with the huge adblock lists that are being maintained by a lot of people

kbenson 1y ago
A lot of things I would have previously said were impossible have happened in the last half year. If only a few of those things were of the impossibly good type.
voidUpdate 1y ago
As said in a reply to a sibling comment, I am very aware. This is wishful thinking

dan15 1y ago

The majority of internet users are either unwilling or unable to pay for content, and so far advertising has been the best business model to allow these users to access content without paying. Do you have a better suggestion?

FuckButtons 1y ago
Sure, this entire business model has been cataclysmic for traditional media organizations and news outlets and peoples trust in institutions has plummeted in correlation, so, let’s just fucking scrap it and go back to payed media.
- geoffpado 1y ago
  "Traditional media organizations" have been primarily funded by advertising longer than anyone on HN has been alive.
  - saagarjha 1y ago
    Some of them; perhaps even a vast majority. But this isn't the only option nor do we have to continue for it to be so.
    - _Algernon_ 1y ago
      Manufacturing consent identified advertisement as one of its five filters and was published in 1988. It is and was extremely rare for a magazine or news paper to not be at least partially funded by advertisements.
bandrami 1y ago
I don't pay for network TV but it still gets produced
- thevinter 1y ago
  And it is funded by ads, what's your point?

bandrami 1y ago

I don't think it has to go that far. I think there's a middle ground here that people would accept: show us ads, but make it a one-way firehose, like TV and billboards. If you need to advertise to pay for the site, put up all the banners you want. But don't try to single me out for a specific one. If it could pay for network TV there's no reason it can't pay for a website. (You could still do audience-level tracking, e.g. "Facbebook and NCIS are both for old people, so advertise cruises and geriatric health services on those properties")

kgwxd 1y ago
We have those one-way firehose online too. They're not mutually exclusive methods. Nothing short of legislation will stop the current norms.

nedt 1y ago

It's already enough to just have plain ads. Like we have them on the streets, at the bus station, newspapers, etc. No tracking needed at all, just give out the message. If you need to target people to it in the context of the place or content you are showing it with. But you don't need to know anything about the user seeing the ad. Targeting by user doesn't work anyway.

gbalduzzi 1y ago
> Targeting by user doesn't work anyway. How did you reach this conclusion? The main problem is that it works way better than traditional marketing medium. It's the reason Google and Facebook are so massive, why would publishers choose to pay them if it doesn't work?
- Doxin 1y ago
  > why would publishers choose to pay them if it doesn't work? Because they believe it works and it's impossible to prove otherwise?
- throwanem 1y ago
  By the same logic cigarettes are presumptively beneficial...
  - lynx97 1y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESoYS9SZW-4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESoYS9SZW-4
- nedt 1y ago
  I've seen it being used. Like on the frontend side with Facebook which thinks if I'm interested into cycling I will also be interested in cars (both are on the street, right?) or if I'm interested in some more dirty humor I also want to see more "naughty" stuff. And also on the backend used by magazines and they mostly don't use the user profiles because it's too targeted and doesn't have enough audience. And if you make the targeting broad enough you'll have again people interested in chocolate so you target them with wine and whiskey. Or even better on Amazon where you can buy a new TV and when you have done so it will suggest you even more TVs for the next months.

burnt-resistor 1y ago

The problem is their greed is unlimited and their power/influence and purchasing power is relative to all of the other billionaires corrupting government and making every little facet of life of ordinary people more expensive, miserable, transactional, and punitive.