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Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by skybrian on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @12:59PM (#22047351)
Markets don't work unless both consumers and producers are satisfied. A classic two-sided market is Ebay. If there were nobody selling stuff there, then nobody would shop there. If nobody bought stuff there, nobody would sell there. You need to satisfy both buyers and sellers (somewhat) to have a market.

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.

Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by mattacular on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @01:08PM (#22047454)
> 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.

Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by tarr11 on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @01:22PM (#22047647)
Not all users have the same privacy desires.

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

Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by mtberatwork on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @01:27PM (#22047738)
I'm sure most are just ignorant as to how much information they are exchanging and not necessarily happy to provide this "by default".
Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by Koremat6666 on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @02:49PM (#22048539)
There is nothing wrong in being ignorant if the efforts to get rid of that ignorance outweigh the benefits for most users. My mother spends 15 minutes on internet talking to me and watching youtube. She does not care if advertisers know her age and location.
Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by summerlight on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @02:26PM (#22048307)
And many of them are equally ignorant as to how much money they have saved due to ad-powered web. What we really need is a transparency on this trade-off, not just bashing the status quo.
Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by UncleMeat on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @03:51PM (#22049119)
There has actually been research on this (in small settings). Even when made aware of the potential consequences, people do not choose to pay significantly more for equivalent products with better privacy protection.

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

Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by mattacular on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @01:28PM (#22047742)
Extremely dubious claim. What personal information? To which companies? For how long? Etc.
Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by skybrian on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @04:21PM (#22049363)
Have you considered the possibility that the future behavior of consumers and lawmakers is not that easy to predict and people have different opinions about it? We can't reliably predict which products will be popular, the next election, or what laws will pass.

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

Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by mattacular on Wednesday January 15, 2020 @08:55AM (#22054107)
Google doesn't need to predict the future of an advertising supported internet when they can manipulate it directly eg. with their chrome marketshare.
Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by skybrian on Wednesday January 15, 2020 @01:14PM (#22056729)
Although Google is a powerful position, this is fundamentally not how markets work. Google is not a dictator directly controlling users, advertisers, or websites. They are other people who make their own decisions based on their perceived interests.

Not even monopoly markets are dictatorships.

Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by roywiggins on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @01:09PM (#22047474)
But why should a browser care about anyone other than the users of the browser? The browser is meant to be my user agent, not a third-party market maker.

(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.

Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by skybrian on Thursday January 16, 2020 @01:06PM (#22067138)
Even if you ultimately care more about users, the incentives are still towards centrism. For example, Firefox still needs to do DRM to keep Netflix happy because users want to watch Netflix videos and will switch browsers to do it.

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.

Re:Building a more private web: A path towards making third ... by amatecha on Tuesday January 14, 2020 @01:22PM (#22047646)
The World Wide Web is not a market.