Facebook and Google are the ad industry.

Their entire business is based on gathering personal information and using it to sell ads. That’s why they must be regulated.

Nobody is talking about regulating ‘tech’ companies for any other reason.

They have certainly absorbed and consolidated a significant portion of the ad market, however they aren't the ad industry.

The "ad industry" exists no matter who is running the ads and has persistent aims and goals that are independent of whatever the vogue ad platform of the day is. Newspapers were the beginning of "influence at scale" for advertisers, then TV completely obliterated that, when internet based attention eclipsed TV, the internet became the "new" platform.

The platform will change again, and the advertising industry will absorb whatever is next and turn it into a cesspool.

This is faulty reasoning. Google and Facebook weren’t absorbed by the Ad industry. They absorbed large parts of the ad industry. They are the ones who did all of the innovation in microtargeting and harvesting of personal information. Not some amorphous external ‘ad industry’.

Advertising is their primary business, and neither of them have any other significant business. Almost everything they do is designed to drive advertising. They are advertising companies plain and simple.

The Ad industry turned Google and Facebook into ad companies, they didn't start with any intention of becoming ad companies. The Ad industry just shifted where it points it's dollars; those dollars weren't taken out of the ad industry.

Google and Facebook wouldn't exist without the ad industry but the ad industry would exist just fine without them. That's how you know if you're sucked into it or not.

Think about it this way, corporations, governments, non-profits etc... all use the ad industry. They hire people who have studied social manipulation to create "content" with the singular purpose of inducing you to take an action you would not have otherwise taken. They have to put that content in front of people somehow, so they go where the people are and then get in front of them there.

If it so happens that a company can attract a lot of people, then that company becomes a target of all the groups who want to get their manipulators in front of those people. Once there is a big enough demand ($$) for that, then the company starts to build processes and systems to make that easy - like adwords. If that's the easiest way to make money, then the company will optimize around that process, and all other things fall to the wayside.

So the causal path is actually perfectly sound reasoning. Market demand in the form of the ad industry, turned the technology companies into ad companies. Pretty simple really.

There are tons of tech companies that don't do this because it's not the right business model, Twilio is one of the best examples. So they never turn into ad companies.

The Ad industry did no such thing. Nobody forced google to create AdWords. That was all them. They designed the advertising product themselves. They chose to become an advertising business.

You provide the point yourself by saying that google and Facebook wouldn’t exist without the ad industry. I.e. they exist because they are advertising companies.

There is no reason a search engine cannot exist without being part of an advertising company. The same is true for a social network.

We're talking past each other so I'm going to abandon this thread, sorry.

You just dishonestly edited your previous responses up the thread before declaring this, to make me look like I was missing your point.

Thae second half of you previous reply would have helped to clarify what you meant. Had it been there when I replied. But it wasn’t. You added three paragraphs after seeing my response.

I still wouldn’t have agreed, but we could have left it there as two different viewpoints.

As it was, you edited your previous reply to make it look as though we were taking past each other.

I question your integrity and I’m glad I don’t have anything to do with your company.

I don't recall editing anything.

I'm not trying to make anyone look poorly, I'm simply stating that I'm not being clear with my point and I didn't have the time or interest in trying to clarify it. No malice.

All the best.

> Regulate the ad industry, not tech companies.

Or better yet: Regulate them both.