Google is just acknowledging that for-profit, advertising-supported websites are a three-sided market; consumers, website authors, and advertisers all have interests. Figuring out how to satisfy everyone is tricky.

It may be that these competing interests can't all be satisfied and an advertising-supported Internet isn't going to make it in the long term, but they are going to try.

Of course they can't all be satisfied. The needs of advertisers are diametrically opposed to the privacy needs of users. There is no way to square this problem so that both groups are happy and Google certainly understands this. They aren't "trying" things out as experiments, they are executing on strategies to ensure their dominance over the business of digital advertising.

Many (most?) are happy to provide their personal information "by default" in exchange for better ad targeting, lower prices, etc.

"Everybody is just ignorant" is not a good way of evaluating markets.

Past results are that the advertising-supported Internet is enormously lucrative. Things are changing though. We will find out what happens when it happens.

Not even monopoly markets are dictatorships.

(yeah, I know they have to care about website designers, otherwise every website will just break, but when you have substantially a huge share of the browser share, you can tell website designers to get stuffed and they will have to deal with it)

I'm being intentionally simplistic- sometimes, complicating things with markets and so on feels like it obscures more than it illuminates.

Compatibility is important, even for the market leader, because if they break too many websites too quickly, that will push people to switch browsers like nothing else. Especially if it's a big website people use every day.

Chrome does have a somewhat easier time taking the lead on deprecating things but it often requires multi-year campaigns and gradual steps. (Consider the campaigns to kill NSAPI and Flash.) This is needed even for Google to maintain compatibility with its own websites.

The analogy to markets still works. Ebay can change the rules to be more buyer-friendly but not so much that too many sellers leave, because buyer-friendly rules don't matter if you can't find the thing you want to buy.

An example of the market breaking down is major news sites blocking Chrome's Incognito mode, despite Chrome's gradual attempts to make fingerprinting harder.

Have you ever dealt with Google as a customer :) ?

Consider Mozilla, the privacy maniacs. Even they let proprietary and intrusive DRM plugin inside, though it is totally contradicts FOSS approach https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7746585

This is life -- you have to take other parties interests into account or you will be buried.

Start block all tracking garbage by default and sites will ban your users, forcing them to choose another product.

Speaking about Google: when you're (unlike Apple) making most of your revenue from ads, any hostile action to ad industry will be considered hypocrisy and unfair competition

DRM is an entirely different problem to that of privacy. While DRM is disgusting, a threat to open source as we know it and overall harmful to humanity as a whole, it does not inherently violate privacy.

Thus, saying "Even [the privacy maniacs] let proprietary and intrusive DRM plugin inside" doesn't make any sense.

Even if this question sounds naive, I feel like we should from time to time take a step back and review our situation.

> Speaking about Google: when you're (unlike Apple) making most of your revenue from ads, any hostile action to ad industry will be considered hypocrisy and unfair competition

I can agree with that (esp. given their monopoly), but the truth is not black and white here: there's a difference between applying the same measures equally to everyone and leaving a bunch of escape hatches for yourself, e.g. that time when Chrome decided to exclude certain Google cookies from the "Clear all cookies" screen.

I think this misses a larger point: advertising on its own requires absolutely no tracking at all. Consider print publications. They still virtually all advertise. And their ads generally relate, in some way, to the demographics who read the publications. There's no reason that approach can't also work on the web.

The problem we're facing today is the notion that advertisers should be able to uniquely target individuals with specific ads. That's a new idea that I think we, as a society, need to reject.

That's how it USED to work on the web and still does in some parts. Until Google (and others) started selling increasingly accurate demographic and behavioural targeting. Now advertisers are addicted to targeting 50+ females who like baking, cats, have at least one grandchild and who have recently shown an interest in Easy Bake Ovens.

I mean, logically it should be worth it because they pay for it, but part of me is wondering if the ad companies are conning their customers on this.

I dislike ads for two reasons:

- highly targeted ads can impact my behaviour in ways I’m not aware of (existing vs. created needs, emotions vs. rational decisions) - it’s an invasion on our personal (internet) and public (your street, your neighbourhood) spaces.

The points above allow for manipulation at a unprecedented scale.

Again, this is more of a mental exercise, a problem I like to revisit from time to time, but if we take the points above into account, removing targeting doesn’t solve the issue completely.

I do think that contextual targeting is a more viable alternative, unless it becomes a rebranded version of behavioural (which is already happening).

This just smells of whataboutism.

As for your hypothesis that websites will start blocking browsers that ban tracking and so forth, frankly, that remains to be seen, and my bet is we'd never actually see that happen in practice. The optics are just too toxic. Surveillance capitalism survives because people don't know it's happening. Banning a browser like Firefox would call attention to an infrastructure and ecosystem that those individuals don't want to talk about in public.

Edit: As an aside, if sites did start banning privacy-conscious browsers like Firefox, I'd just stop going to those sites. In that respect, I'd actually perversely appreciate something like this: It'd finally make it blatantly obvious who is and isn't collecting and profiting from data about me and my actions online without my permission.

I already do this -- if a site doesn't work with my defenses against the ad industry up, then I don't go back to that site.

The result of the GDPR regulAtions resulted in a moderate number of us websites refusing access to EU residents rather than attempt to comply. I think it's an entirely reasonably assumption that said sites would block a browser which attempted a similar idea

Some sites would go behind paywalls, some would cease to exist, and some will just run nontargeted ads, but some would do none of those things.

These sites that can't be used without DRM plugin do not provide you a way around DRM because you're ruining their business model (at least they think so, or their content providers).

The same goes with ads. If your browser start for example blocking ads at sites that live from it (like New York Times website), website administration will eventually ban your browser at all.

This is how it should work, users come first.

Just as all this tracking protection stuff is optional but ships out of the box in a configuration that's deemed the most beneficial to the user, DRM, while enabled by default, can be disabled by simply uninstalling the plugin.

As I say: it just smells of whataboutism.

Users need publishers to be able to make enough money to survive, or there won't be any content for them to use. You can't totally screw over either side, or the other will no longer exist.

> In particular, Google:

> has required manufacturers to pre-install the Google Search app and browser app (Chrome), as a condition for licensing Google's app store (the Play Store);

I almost miss Slashdot style "Micro$$$oft" discussions, at least people had some baseline hostility toward browser hegemony.

No, absolutely not. User-targeted advertising does not need to exist, a priori. Plenty of empires were built on privacy-friendly content-targeted advertising in the past and there's no reason that can't be done now. Except that Google would make far less money.

I strongly doubt the internet would stop working.

I fear that we would see a huge wave of advertising in disguise and other not necessarily more transparent forms of indirect funding and influencing.

For instance, there would suddenly be a very big incentive for product companies to become media companies themselves to make the distinction between reporting, advertising and simply describing their own product go away.

I believe an advertising ban would have a very large number of unintended and undesirable consequences.

Nonsense. I'm not going to stop buying food or soap because I don't see ads for it.

$300B is no way negligible by any mean and businesses are tightly coupled so the impact will propagate across everywhere. For instance, almost every functional search engines are powered by advertisement in some way (even DDG); how would you use the internet without a search engine?

Although I think your point is correct, I don't think that this program's failure is evidence for it. I give cash money to numerous small creators, but there's absolutely no way that I would have used the Google Contributer program to do it. That requires more trust in Google than I can muster.

A tremendous amount of resources are wasted on adtech - bandwidth, latency, which ultimately are accounted for in non-renewable time. Just compare using hacker news on mobile to reddit. I have a newish iPhone and reddit is basically unusable. Plausibly it’s a net-neutral situation, the downsides balancing out the upsides.

Similar evaluations can be made in the gaming space, comparing paid, freemium, and advertising driven. It wasn’t until fairly recently that advertising was even a viable revenue source for game developers.

The larger question perhaps is who loses their audience when they can no longer buy targeted advertising? Hint: it’s not the giant brands who blast billions of dollar blindly on mass advertising campaigns and can purchase Super Bowl commercials.

Disclaimer, a significant proration of the money I’ve made in the past decade + was from digital advertising.

Not to mention cognitive resources. How much brain power has the world wasted on trying to get people to look at or click on things?

Just a tip, if I want to use reddit on an iPhone, I usually go to i.reddit.com or reddit.com/.compact

There are also third party apps (I like Slide for Reddit) which are pretty good.

I think a probable scenario is that Google’s search ads and display ads business will have to be segmented from the rest of Google’s businesses. The other alternative may be to remove search bundled with search advertising, YouTube with its accompanying video advertising, and so on.

I would be more optimistic about Google’s ability to keep itself together, but they seem to have turned themselves in to a case study of corporate mismanagement and disfunction. Who knows what sorts of insane criminal things and accumulating at this point. Those future moments of weakness and going to make them incredibly vulnerable to regulators on both sides of the Atlantic, from both the right and the left. That is not a survivable position.

I fixed it for you.

So, this monster is "too big to fail"? All the more reason to kill it now before it gets even worse.

When users can't be tracked, ads will be less targeted which means Google will not be as valuable to advertisers.

i don't understand how this helps the conversation.