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Cory Doctorow

Facebook and Google illegally colluded to rig the ad-market with a program called #JediBlue that let the companies steal from both advertisers and media companies:

techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/goog

Apple blocked Facebook's surveillance on its mobile devices, but increased its own surveillance of #Iphone and #Ipad users in order to target ads to them, even when those users explicitly opted out of spying:

pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/lux

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:55 | Open on mamot.fr
22 comments
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Today, we live in the enshittification end-times, red of tooth and claw, where media companies' revenues are dwindling and advertisers' costs are soaring. The tech giants are raking in hundreds of billions, firing hundreds of thousands of workers, and pissing away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

doctorow.medium.com/mass-tech-

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:55 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

As Angwin points out, in the era before behavioral advertising, Jeremy's might have bought an ad in *Deer & Deer Hunting* or another magazine that caters to he-man types who don't want woke razors; the same is true for *all* products and publications. Before mass, non-consensual surveillance, ads were based on *content* and *context*, not on the reader's prior behavior.

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:56 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

There's no reason that ads today couldn't return to that regime. Contextual ads operate without surveillance, using the same "real-time bidding" mechanism to place ads based on the content of the article and some basic parameters about the user (rough location based on IP address, time of day, device type):

pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/beh

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:56 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Context ads perform about as well as behavioral ads - but they have a radically different power-structure. No media company will ever know as much about a given user as an ad-tech giant practicing dragnet surveillance and buying purchase, location and finance data from data-brokers. But no ad-tech giant knows as much about the context and content of an article as the media company that published it.

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:56 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Context ads are, by definition, centered on the media company or creative worker whose work they appear alongside of. They are *much* harder for tech giants to enshittify, because enshittification requires lock-in and it's hard to lock in a publication who knows better than anyone what they're publishing and what it means.

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:56 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

We should ban surveillance advertising. Period. Companies should not be allowed to collect our data without our meaningful opt-in consent, and if that was the standard, there would be no data-collection:

pluralistic.net/2022/03/22/myo

Remember when Apple created an opt *out* button for tracking, more than 94 percent of users clicked it (the people who clicked "yes" to "can Facebook spy on you?" were either Facebook employees, or confused):

cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-s

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We should ban surveillance advertising. Period. Companies should not be allowed to collect our data without our meaningful opt-in consent, and if that was the standard, there would be no data-collection:

pluralistic.net/2022/03/22/myo

Remember when Apple created an opt *out* button for tracking, more than 94 percent of users clicked it (the people who clicked "yes" to "can Facebook spy on you?" were either Facebook employees, or confused):

8 Apr 2023 at 15:57 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Ad-targeting enables a host of evils, like paid political disinformation. It also leads to more expensive, lower-quality goods. "A Raw Deal For Consumers," Sumit Sharma's new #ConsumerReports paper, catalogs the many other costs imposed on Americans due to the lack of tech regulation:

advocacy.consumerreports.org/w

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:57 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Sharma describes the benefits that Europeans will shortly enjoy thanks to the EU's #DigitalMarketsAct and #DigitalServicesAct, from lower prices to more privacy to more choice, from cloud gaming on mobile devices to competing app stores.

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:58 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

However, both the EU and the US - as well as Canada and Australia - have focused their news industry legislating on misguided #LinkTaxes, where tech giants are required to pay license fees to link to and excerpt the news. This is an approach grounded in the mistaken idea that tech giants are stealing media companies' content - when really, tech giants are stealing their *money*:

pluralistic.net/2022/04/18/new

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:58 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Creating a new pseudocopyright to control who can discuss the news is a terrible idea, one that will make the media companies beholden to the tech giants at a time when we desperately need deep, critical reporting on the tech sector. In Canada, where #BillC18 is the latest link tax proposal in the running to become law, we're already seeing that conflict of interest come into play.

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:58 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

As #JesseBrown and @Paulatics - veteran reporter turned senator - discuss on #Canadaland, the #TorontoStar's sharp critical series on the tech giants died a swift, unexplained death after the *Star* began receiving license fees for tech users' links:

canadaland.com/paula-simons-bi

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:59 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Meanwhile, in #Australia, the #NewsBargainingCode stampeded tech giants into "voluntary" negotiations with the media companies, allowing #RupertMurdoch's #Newscorp to claim the lion's share, and then conduct layoffs across its newsrooms.

While in #France, the link tax depends on publishers integrating with #GoogleShowcase, a product that makes Google *more* money from news content and makes news publishers *more* dependent on Google:

politico.eu/article/french-com

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Meanwhile, in #Australia, the #NewsBargainingCode stampeded tech giants into "voluntary" negotiations with the media companies, allowing #RupertMurdoch's #Newscorp to claim the lion's share, and then conduct layoffs across its newsrooms.

While in #France, the link tax depends on publishers integrating with #GoogleShowcase, a product that makes Google *more* money from news content and makes news publishers *more* dependent on Google:

8 Apr 2023 at 15:59 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

A link tax only pays for so long as the tech giants remain dominant and continue to extract the massive profits that make them capable of paying the tax. But legislative action to fix the ad-tech markets, like #MikeLee's ad-tech breakup bill (cosponsored by both #TedCruz *and* #ElizabethWarren!) would shift power to publishers, and with it, money:

lee.senate.gov/2023/3/the-amer

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:59 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

With ad-tech intermediaries scooping up 50% or more of every advertising dollar, there is plenty of potential to save news without the need for a link tax. If unrigging the ad-tech market drops the platforms' share of advertising dollars to a more reasonable 10%, then the advertisers and publishers could split the remainder, with advertisers spending 20% less and publishers netting 20% *more*.

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8 Apr 2023 at 15:59 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Passing a federal privacy law would end surveillance advertising at the stroke of a pen, shifting the market to context ads that let publishers, not platforms, call the shots. As an added bonus, the law would stop #Tiktok from spying on Americans, and also end Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft's spying to boot:

pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik

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8 Apr 2023 at 16:00 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Mandating competition in app stores - as the Europeans are poised to do - would kill Google and Apple's 30% "app store tax" - the percentage they rake off of every transaction from every app on Android and Ios. Drop that down to the 2-5% that the credit cards charge, and every media outlet's revenue-per-subscriber would jump by 25%.

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8 Apr 2023 at 16:00 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Add to that an #EndToEnd rule for tech requiring them to deliver updates from willing receivers to willing senders, thus newsletter you subscribed to would stay out of your spam folder and every post by the media you followed shows up in your feed:

pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e

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8 Apr 2023 at 16:00 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

That would make it end tech giants' sleazy enshittification gambit of forcing creative workers and media companies to pay to "boost" their content (or pay $8/month for a #BlueTick) just to get it in front of the people who asked to see it:

doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1

The point of enshittification is that it's bad for everyone *except* the shareholders of tech monopolists. Jeremy's Razors are bad, winning a 2.7 star rating out of five:

facebook.com/JeremysRazors/rev

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That would make it end tech giants' sleazy enshittification gambit of forcing creative workers and media companies to pay to "boost" their content (or pay $8/month for a #BlueTick) just to get it in front of the people who asked to see it:

doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1

The point of enshittification is that it's bad for everyone *except* the shareholders of tech monopolists. Jeremy's Razors are bad, winning a 2.7 star rating out of five:

8 Apr 2023 at 16:00 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

The company charges more for these substandard razors, and you are more likely to find out about them, because of targeted, behavioral ads. These ads starve media companies and creative workers and make social media and search results *terrible*.

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8 Apr 2023 at 16:00 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

A link tax depends on #BigTech staying big, dribbling a few crumbs for media companies, compromising their ability to report on their deep-pocketed beneficiaries, in a way that advantages the biggest media companies and leaves small, local and independent press in the cold.

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8 Apr 2023 at 16:01 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

By contrast, a privacy law, ad-tech breakups, app-store competition and end-to-end delivery would shatter the power of Big Tech and shift power to users, creative workers and media companies. These are solutions that don't just keep working if Big Tech goes away - they actually hasten that demise! What's more, they work just as well for big companies as they do for independents.

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8 Apr 2023 at 16:01 | Open on mamot.fr
Cory Doctorow replied to Cory

Whether you're the *Times* or you're an ex-*Times* reporter who's quit your job and now crowdfunds to cover your local school board and town council meetings, shifting *control* and the *share of income* is will benefit you, whether or not Big Tech is still in the picture.

--

Image:
freeimageslive.co.uk (modified)
freeimageslive.co.uk/free_stoc

CC BY 3.0
creativecommons.org/licenses/b

eof/

Whether you're the *Times* or you're an ex-*Times* reporter who's quit your job and now crowdfunds to cover your local school board and town council meetings, shifting *control* and the *share of income* is will benefit you, whether or not Big Tech is still in the picture.

--

Image:
freeimageslive.co.uk (modified)
freeimageslive.co.uk/free_stoc

8 Apr 2023 at 16:01 | Open on mamot.fr
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