It would be great if folks could think beyond questioning the business model in terms of what (controversial content) increases user attention and think about questioning the model itself: using the internet to sell attention. There is nothing that demands the internet must be used this way.
The big tech companies like to combat the possibility of any such thinking by invoking people's fear of change. Something like "The internet would not be as you know it today if advertising decreased." The reader is supposed to think, "Oh my gosh, what a scary thought." However the internet as we know it today is not necessarily the best the internet could be. That should be obvious. Tech employees are having a crisis of conscience.
Tech companies and their investors want everyone to presume the way things are now is the best possible outcome. That is because they know they have a money printing machine (see, e.g., Tucker Bounds quote) so long as the internet remains open for unregulated advertising. They will keep advancing this idea that the internet would suck without unregulated ads, but there is no evidence that is true. No one can predict the future. Tech company spokespersons try to paint a picture of a possible future where web users would have to pay for using websites. There is nothing that indicates that would be the outcome. Tech companies do not control the internet. They do not own the internet. Tech companies might die without advertising, but websites might flourish. Both commercial and non-commercial. People might find relief from excessive screen time. The mom and pop retailer or SMB/SME are not going to charge customers to use their websites. Users will continue to pay access fees to ISPs. "The tech industry" !== the internet. It uses the internet to advance its own interests (these may be aligned somewhat to those of advertisers, but they often conflict with the interests of users). Tech companies must use the internet for advertising or face an existential crisis. That is not true for users. We can use the internet for whatever we want. We pay for it. Generally, advertisers do not pay our internet access fees.
We pay for access to a network that tech companies usurp to sap our attention for a fee, paid by advertisers. We do not get a cut of those payments. The whole system is incredibly one-sided and should be questioned. It is far from ideal.
The business model that Shoshana Zuboff termed surveillance capitalism did not just ruin the internet but undermined the future of the entire tech industry.
Tech is far, far more than social or search. Most of it requires significant levels of trust between tech provider and tech consumer. It also requires that the tech consumer pays and therefore has some influence over the service, in a virtuous circle of demand and supply.
Despite absurd claims that people just want "free stuff", people pay through their noses for 1) hardware, 2) software and 3) bandwidth - the entire stack that makes the internet (and therefore search and social) possible.
The idea that they don't want to pay specifically for these "last mile" trinkets of search or social (that in reality have no option but to pay with private data) does not stand scrutiny.
The adtech gambit was so lucrative and it managed to buy so many consciences that people have normalized it. Yet it is a disastrous model that does not scale to deliver the promise that we all feel is within reach.
The simple fact is that for tech to flourish somebody must pull the plug on surveillance capitalism. The sooner the better.
It's another step forward in the maturation of the Internet technology industry, which grew up, with the Internet itself, under a regime of benign neglect.
That time is over, as evidenced by the growing impingement of regulations, taxes, law enforcement, spying, and now populism on what Internet technology companies are trying to do.
I don't see any reason to believe that Internet technologies are somehow unique or special enough to avoid these sorts of interactions and conflicts with the rest of broader society.
Many CEOs and investors of Internet companies seem to think of themselves as self-made and self-contained leaders who are naturally free from the constraints of other industries. The leaders of railroads, steel mills, oil companies, car companies, real estate, etc. once saw themselves the same way. Now those industries are tightly hemmed with regulations at the local, state, national, and in some cases international levels. Internet companies will be too--especially as they tread onto these turfs.
I'm not saying this is good--I'm just saying it's reality.
To fight back, the Internet industry will need a strong presence in Washington and in politics. But that goes against the pseudo-libertarian culture, so they don't have one, aside from the few biggest companies like Google and Facebook.
The hardest part is that there is no natural political home for the Internet company mindset today. The Democratic Party, while in line with the social leanings of Internet leaders, is also home to the populist movements taking aim at Silicon Valley's riches and entitlement.
And while part of the Republican Party is in line with the economic and regulatory mindset of Internet companies, it does not hold the reigns of the party. It is at least sharing them with Tea Party and religious grassroots movements that most Internet company leaders are personally uncomfortable with.
Imo, the idea that this is about selling advertising and maintaining market share is being used as a false justification. This is not about being able to drive users to ads.
The bigger picture is that Google et al are actually part of the control structure. The governance system wants deanonymised Internet. Corporate interests are how this is being promoted - government legislation would be a harder pill for the masses to accept.
But all the recent mega changes tell us (Elon buying twitter, etc) tell us that this is on the way. Apparent anonymous internet will be sandboxed. Knowing everything about everyone all the time, and having that data being crunched by ai's is an amazing, audacious goal, that seems close to being achieved.
Big Tech is DOA if the web is not open for commercial use, i.e., advertising. But the web is definitely not DOA if all advertising ceased. Look at the enormous growth of the internet, the vast number of users with internet subscriptions today, billions of them using the network on a daily basis for a variety of non-commerial uses, hundreds of millions uploading content for others to consume. (Big Tech middlemen pervert this recreational usage for their own commercial uses.)
The internet was not created for the purposes of advertising. (There was none in the beginning.) That is only one use. Look what happens when we allow ads without any rules. Yikes.
Even if advertising were regulated, the web could still be used for commerce, e.g., processing commercial transactions.
Precisely. While it is a cat-and-mouse game, I think the tech industry has shown that there is a vested interest in cleaning this crap out of our lives. The internet seems to be the last place where a market is free to tackle and solve problems on its own.
How about the internet being used as a mass surveillance machine and the obliteration of producers in favor of consumers? That facet isn’t a drop in the bucket of internet usage. M
I think focusing what it could be used for and what it has been used for isn’t the right way to approach thinking about it. The internet is by and large used for consuming content from a handful of corporations (disclaimer: I have no source to back up this claim), and a lot of negative consequences follow from that.
This argument severely underestimates the alternatives available to the current corporate tech hegemony. Put yourself in the position of Internet persona non grata and let’s look at your alternatives.
Twitter doesn’t like you(or whoever “Big Tech“TM goes after next)? Yet you can still say whatever they want on their own website.
YouTube doesn’t like you? You can self-host your videos.
Facebook doesn’t like you? No access to FB products then. Nobody will look for the persona non grata there anyway.
Google doesn’t like you? You can log your own traffic and use an alternative email provider, or self-host.
Unranked in SRP? Advertise in the real world or via word of mouth.
Microsoft doesn’t like you? Run Linux.
Azure/AWS doesn’t like you? Use an alternative IaaS or buy your own hardware.
Hardware vendors don’t like you? Secondhand market.
Apple doesn’t like you? Flip phone!
Linus Torvalds himself doesn’t like you!?!? OpenBSD!
The weak point that I can see in living in a world in which the Internet itself doesn’t want you is your connection itself. While there will always be free speech-focused ISPs willing to connect anyone (within the law) the backbones might decide to drop traffic headed for their website. Not much you can do about that I guess.
The internet was around before Larry Page and Sergei Brin, and Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. These companies provide convenient tools which make it easy to do a few things but they are highly unnecessary for life itself, even online life. We have let them get too big. But we have not let them get too necessary.
Is this suggesting we could actually live without Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Many of us did that for many years of our lives. At the time, I never anticipated with the internet and eventually the web is that people who had never experienced life without it could so easily be caused to lose sight of what is possible, in favor of the mess we have today. The biggest impediment I see to positive change is that younger generations are being indoctrinated into a world where "tech" companies, intermediaries supported by advertising, are perceived as an essential part of using the internet. This is of course patently false. But these companies are ultimately surveilling and controlling the dialogue. After all, internet subscribers use these "tech" company intermediaries to communicate.
Before advertising took over the internet, the inter-network's user base was relatively small. Folks who used the internet recreationally during that time were likely to be technically minded people who enjoyed computers, the type of people many of which who are working with advertising supported "tech" companies today. Few of them are going to portray an advertising-free internet as a viable option. Their livelihoods today depend on advertising. Supporting Big Tech is their "work".
Anyway, it is good to see at least one commenter can contemplate a better course for the future.
It is possible to communicate and share over the internet without the use of Big Tech. However, as long as advertising-supprted "tech" companies sit between users, operating as intermediaries, that truth will keep getting buried deeper with every new generation.
The situation as I see it is that we’ve essentially created a new place - the digital world - and it started with very little infrastructure. Facebook and Google have created a lot of the infrastructure we need “for free” - in exchange for doing surveillance capitalism everywhere. It’s like if big megacorps owned the roads outside your house and tracked you and advertised to you as soon as you set foot outdoors. And they will ban you from using the road outside if an AI doesn’t like something you do. Apple made a fiefdom with a harsh 30% tax of any trades inside their walls. - and once you’re inside, it’s very expensive to leave.
The whole situation is crying out for some sort of civic process. If we live part of our lives in cyberspace, we need a voice in how those spaces are governed. Something “By the people, for the people.” We don’t let corporations run towns in the real world and do this sort of thing. It’s entirely consistent to want to bring democratic values online too.
Its very interesting if limiting how companies are allowed to track, store and sell private information would be the central issue for which the internet will fragment around. It almost like tracking, storing and selling is the center of the modern Internet, rather than protocols like tcp, upd, https and so on.
In the past people said that the Internet was made for porn. Today the Internet is seemingly made for advertisement and surveillance. It not strange that so many people who worked in this industry for decades are feeling a bit lost in this new horrifying industry, which if the Internet really is made only to do advertisement and surveillance, I honestly think humanity is better off without it.
I feel the problem is not tech, it's people. People will always flow towards walled gardens (jails), centralised solutions, and converge towards critical mass.
The running systems need cash and it's in their best interest to keep audiences captive and paying. So what you're seeing with the complexity of the web is a system that was initially built on trust and has been compensating for bad actors and economic incentives ever since.
Now that this 'system' is in place, it's going to be very hard to change it. Look at any other real life system you deal with and how hard it is to change it, even if it's no longer suitable for modern life or future concerns.
People don't want to pay for digital content, search, or social networking. Advertising, data harvesting, aka surveillance capitalism is the only remaining major business model for the web. This is like saying your neighborhood gas/petrol station is downsizing because of mismanagement, and you're cheering because you think that means the end of the fossil fuels industry is near. Whatever replaces Google, if it fails, will certainly be at least as invested in advertising as they are.
I think after 25 years of the internet experiment, it's safe to say that the tech industry is all about changing who is rich, and who isn't.
We've rebuilt all the same power structures, but with different players.
We could have had a cultural renaissance, a democratization of information and thought. Instead, we got a plague of click-bait tabloids, echo chambers, walled gardens, algorithmic gatekeepers, and television that you don't need a cable subscription for.
There is an entire historical tranche of business oriented toward commodification, which I believe is what we're seeing applied to internet functionality as a whole. All kinds of services with nothing much behind them, to the point that business models are being based upon not much more than a Rails gem and force of personality.
I'm with you. In the nascent days of the internet none of these media businesses were around. And it was good - great even. If we had an issue, we'd solve it with technology and not by throwing money at a centralized corporation.
There’s nothing about the technology behind the Internet that means that ad-surveillance needs to be its default business model, for example.
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