Reconsidering The Role of Advertising In a 'Free Internet'

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The "free internet supported by advertising" idea is just a proposition, not a fact. Why does Wikipedia exist? Why does free software, or any other form of culture that does not sustain itself by commoditizing its audience? Rather than throwing up your hands in a conclusion that asks us to balance unexamined premises, why not try to determine what the landscape of culture and information is underneath the narrative peddled by the peddlers? A draft that asked some of the questions to which they answers are assumed in this one would make very substantial progress, and be helpful to you in your larger learning.

-- DaphneL - 14 Oct 2019

-- DaphneL - 14 Oct 2019

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The technology companies that enable online advertising (e.g. Google) often tout the immense social benefit that online advertising brings – a free internet. By that, they mean that advertising enables consumers to access content for free as publishers make money by placing ads alongside or within their content. On the other side, advertisers are willing to pay a higher premium to place their ads alongside content they think will drive user engagement and to target users that meet the specific requirements on their campaign. My first job out of college was building and targeting the algorithms for these ad campaigns to make sure the right audience saw the right advertisement. While I would joke with friends that I was the person following them around the internet with that pair of shoes they once clicked on an ad for, the truth was it didn’t seem all that nefarious to me. We optimized the ads to get you to click more, or watch longer, or better yet to buy a product – and publishers made money because of it. We even made a concerted push to deactivate ‘bots’ and fake websites that distorted the market – all in service of making ‘a better internet’.

In the service of making this ‘free internet’ sustainable for publishers, effective for advertisers, and incredibly profitable for everyone in the middle they created a system that enables users to be tracked across every site. If I, at a mid-sized ad-tech company, could run an analysis to see the path of sites any individual user id had made before they bought the product I was selling, it is hard to quantify what the major tech companies can do. Until recently however, I thought it didn’t quite matter. But, the moment we’ve enabled this magnitude of tracking, we have allowed it to be used to manipulate our behavior in all the sorts of ways we talk about in this class and read about every day.

However, if we removed this capability, we must consider what happens to the content that for the most part is sustained by forms of advertising. Arguably not every publisher can put up a paywall and survive. More importantly, what happens if we shut ourselves off from parts of the internet? The information we consume is increasingly targeted to us and our beliefs, but at least we have access to a broad array of opinions. In theory, this allows for a marketplace of ideas that can help quell division and the proliferation of extremist ideas.

Of the various potential outcomes, perhaps this process would limit the infinite amount of information available but leave quality journalism (as defined by that which people will pay for) to shine for itself. This would likely require some way for those who can afford to pay for the content to subsidize it for those who cannot. It is not hard to imagine how this could be taken advantage of – funneling money to ensure access of X group of voters to Y site. Alternatively, we could move backwards to a world of advertising that can’t target users accurately or focuses on content-specific advertising similar to Buzzfeed’s listicles today. Perhaps if we could have true access to, and understanding of, all the data that has been collected on us to date, we could at least opt-in to certain categories for targeting purposes.

One alternative proposition being pushed forward by Jaron Lanier amongst others is for individuals to be paid for their data. Any time you post a photo and a tech company gobbles your data only to then track your friend who likes it (and so on), you get a cut. He estimates a small household could make $20,000 a year through this process. Even if the infrastructure and technology to do so existed – he admits it doesn’t – this does not quite seem like a solution. The moment someone has paid us for our data they gain the right to do whatever they want with it. At that point, we normalize a practice in which companies can sell our information to manipulate what we buy, where we go, who we vote for and almost every other facet of our lives. The commodification of data seems almost like a clear sign that we’ve lost the war, not just the battle.

Looking forward, it is unclear what the best approach is to balancing access to content and user privacy. However, it is clear that the proliferation of tracking has crossed every boundary previously imaginable. Cambridge Analytica is just one prominent example of it. While we can use DuckDuckGo? to avoid searches being tracked, have Ghostery block trackers, and set our Google data to autodestruct, that is neither truly effective nor doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. Perhaps, if we remove the justification of online advertising it will be harder for the Google and Facebook’s of the world to justify tracking our every move. Though it seems almost too difficult to contemplate, lowering the advertising revenue for publishers may actually result in innovation and a better product – without necessarily putting everything behind a paywall. While all theoretical, it seems to me that undermining the rationalization for storing user’s data may help build a powerful argument against it.