The internet could be "fixed" by regulating advertising. In the beginning there were rules. No commercial use. When that was lifted we started the descent into where things are now. It began with a lawyer posting an ad about immigration services to Usenet. It has come a long way since then. All the while, the web browser has supported always advertising, making it easier and easier to consume ads, buy and sell via the web.
People in the 1990's who wanted "e-commerce" got their wish. Certain companies and individuals have become wealthy beyond imagination. Companies are hording cash. However it is not an equal playing field.
Governments have heretofore been unwilling to regulate. Some, those who are proifiting from the status quo, might say this is starting to change. Even if this is true, the change is very slow. In Mozilla Corporation's domicile, there has been no significant change.
Mozilla is funded indirectly by advertising. Their funding comes from Google. Google's funding comes from advertisers.
That, historically speaking, is not enough. People will find a away to screw up advertising, whether intentionally or not, so long as there is revenue to earn. Perhaps things have gotten better but when I used to dig into that code for work some years ago it was near negligent incompetent.
If you are going to recommend regulation the only thing that works, as exemplified by every other profession, is credentials: licensing and certification. There would be less bad software in the world if there were less bad software developers employed writing software and everybody else held to a minimum ethical standard.
Right now, at least before COVID, there was no motivation to write good software. Many developers, at least web developers whether front or back end, only goal was employability which often meant tooling to a tech stack and trying not to write original software.
Edit: I anticipate this will be downvoted extensively, because regulating minimal developer competence is always heavily down voted. It’s curious though that people claim there is a problem they want fixed only until they realize the fix applies directly to them, at which point the problem is no longer worth the effort.
Regulation is a start. In the short history of the commercial internet, we have seen that any notion of "self-regulation" is a joke. The reason some of these particularly acute problems in your industry exist is because there is zero regulation. It is also why the industry is so profitable, and why those profits can be channeled to a select few particpants without much resistance. The conflict of interest that stands in the way of changing the status quo is insurmountable without having at least some rules. History so far has shown there is no practical way to restrain this type of activity without some legal basis. No amounts of money from advertising and investors are going to solve these problems.
No one wants regulation but without it, a few large companies are going to be the ones making the "rules". The future of the internet's design will be crafted to fuel their continued survival. I have been watching this happen since the birth of the web. It is easier to see when you do not work in the industry.
Imagine if advertising did not subsidise your work and you had to sell your software. How much would people pay? Yes, there would be motivation to write original, quality software. But this is a terrifying idea to today's software "engineers". The hell with good software, they want to get paid. Advertisers can make that happen.
If someone really believes the internet and advertising are like chocolate and peanut butter -- they go great together -- just look at what has happened to "news", a profession that, like today's "tech" industry, relies on advertising to survive. Every day people come to HN to complain about the ridiculous headlines, bias, sensationalism, etc. We are losing serious journalism. We are also losing serious software. From where I sit, we are losing a lot. Whatever we are gaining seems like a poor tradeoff.
If anything, this is one measure directly at odds with democratizing the Web.
You wrote a brilliant app but lack a license? No audience for you.
Also, if you have to produce an MVP to the same building code as a house with 50 years of expected use requires, this is death to all but exceptionally well-funded innovation.
Software is bigger than just the web. You can be your own lawyer or your own medical doctor without a license, but it’s generally a bad idea. Even lawyers know better than that and hire other lawyers to represent them.
> Also, if you have to produce an MVP to the same building code as a house with 50 years of expected use requires
Not all lawyers are specializing in the same area in which they need a representation in court; this is how an accomplished OS kernel engineer may hire someone to build a good Web frontend.
If everything you build should be built to last in order to ever be exposed to public, the rate of experimentation will slow down a lot, so finding a product-market fit would become very hard. Look at the glacial pace of progress in, say, light aviation where Cessnas with engines from 1980s still rule, because certification of a new engine is so hard.
> If everything you build should be built to last in order to ever be exposed to public
I suspect this becomes more true the closer you get to the metal. As a web developer I have never seen web application code that is built to last, at least in the corporate world. I know its possible to build software in this space that is built to last, because web standards are solid and almost always backward compatible.
Developers in this space are more interested in employable criteria, such as well known named frameworks and tools from NPM. I have heard all kinds of excuses to justify that behavior as somehow credible, but its never based on evidence. The reasoning and excuses always ultimately exist solely to serve the needs of the developer and not the business or product, which is an ethics violation. The near universal presence of that behavior does not make it qualified.
I mean I would agree with your position if most institutions were able to produce competent software engineers and didn't cost a life. And even if they did, I wonder how many of them work for an ad network while they certainly can work at any other job with good pay.
On the other hand, other industries with certification and oaths are much more shady. You can't hammer ethics through academics. If anything, current academical culture encourages being unethical and liar while disguising as opposite. In my own experience, people who seem obsessed with degrees and accredition were the most unethical I had seen. They usually are in management position or law/government stuff.
So I downvoted this comment despite agreeing because this doesn't seem practical. This is unnecessary gatekeeping that will disproportionately affect "poor" people and increase status quo for no benefit in return.
> I mean I would agree with your position if most institutions were able to produce competent software engineers and didn't cost a life.
Likewise, not everybody who graduates law school should be a lawyer. Education in other industries is just a prerequisite of a larger process and certainly not a qualifier. Other industries solve for this problem with either broker/agent relationships or through forced internships. Those filtering criteria are built into the licensing process and result in forced mentoring at the liability of a license holder.
I think if browsers didn't allow JS calls to other domains without a user prompt it would solve almost all the woes ads/trackers bring. I'm willing to give up whatever optimizations the current silent behavior allows. I'm sure Google would do everything to stop that from ever being standard though.
What would stop people using a CNAME record to point ads.example.com to a third party ad server? I don't think there would be a way to use cookies to track people across different sites, but the ad servers could still use ip addresses and browser fingerprinting to check if its the same user.
this is unfortunately relatively easy to work around. if you want ad revenue you agree to host a third party's script on your own site, with a cron job to pull updates. then you collect tracking data, send it to your own backend, and upload it from there to google/facebook/whoever.
That requires the site owner and the tracking network to build a trust relationship, which is how it should be. I don't want my machine to be an intermediary.
> The internet could be "fixed" by regulating advertising.
Regulation always requires coordination, which is simply not possible at internet scale. Facebook and Twitter can't even regulate the content on their own platforms, and you're talking about regulation at an even larger scale against strong interests with large financial reserves.
What's needed is a secure/private by default browser sandbox so these interests have no say in how their content is consumed. Take a look the extremes Gemini has gone to ensure privacy [1]. Some of those can be relaxed without compromising privacy much, but a serious effort along those lines is what's actually needed.
We are somehow able to regulate consumer goods (health and safety standards for example), which also is a global operation involving hundreds of thousands of actors.
> We are somehow able to regulate consumer goods (health and safety standards for example), which also is a global operation involving hundreds of thousands of actors.
Because you can enforce it at the point of sale, ie. selling X happens in a limited geographical region which can be enforced.
The "point of sale" equivalent on the internet is the browser, which is exactly where I said the privacy properties need to be enforced.
Finally, it's frankly absurd to want inefficient and expensive legal controls when cheap and automatic technological controls are perfectly feasible. Why involve the various governments at all?
>Facebook and Twitter can't even regulate the content on their own platforms,
How are we supposed to know this given that they don't have an actual incentive to do so? Look at the allegedly "unworkable" enforcement of hate-speech legislation in say, Germany. What did Facebook do when they were faced with 4% global revenue fines? Hire some moderators and it appears to work reasonbaly well.
Same goes for advertising. Get out the hammer and I bet it wouldn't take long until those companies suddenly discover how creative they can be in cleaning their act up.
> What did Facebook do when they were faced with 4% global revenue fines? Hire some moderators and it appears to work reasonbaly well. Same goes for advertising.
No it doesn't. Facebook is a highly visibile, monolithic entity. If you only have a few bad actors legislation works fine. This isn't the case here.
If you want a more apt analogy, the fight against privacy violations in advertising is much closer to the fight against piracy: it will never go away, no matter how many legal restrictions you put in place, unless there's a technological solution that prevents it from the get-go. There probably isn't for piracy, but there is for privacy.
Google and Facebook benefitted the most from GDPR and grew in size, fyi.
Google helped write GDPR.
I am tired of hearing this troupe of putting more and more regulations to stop shit from breaking when exactly this caused monopolies in many traditional sectors that haven't been changed since like forever because the red tape to do anything requires a team of expensive lawyers.
If you are for more regulation, please at least come up with a way to regulate that seems practical.
I am tired of hearing this troupe of there is no perfect solution so therefore no solution is acceptable.
Another favourite is "I see unethical behaviour at my job, but if I quit nothing would change, therefore I will keep helping them do what they do."
If laws were passed that gave users a cause of action against Google and Facebook for breaking rules, then there would be some motivation for those companies to change their behaviour.
It is sad but that is how corporate behaviour is shaped in America. Threat of litigation. Fear.
Empowering David to keep Goliath honest. That is one of the ideals America was once known for. Big tech however knows no David. They have little to fear.
Alternatively you can support the "system" we have now -- tweet and/or post your complaints to the web, which of course Big Tech is controlling and monitoring. Vent your frustrations till you turn blue. This system is not working. Nothing is changing. These companies are doing things users know is wrong but none of this violates any law or any user's rights in America.
I am not for more regulation. I am for change. Giving David the ability to take on Goliath is one way to facilitate change that is known to work in America. Is it perfect? Not even close, but it is effective at changing corporate behaviour.
Choosing to shoot down every proposed solution is also choosing to keep things the way they are. Sitting on your hands is not keeping things from getting worse.
I never said anything about GDPR and personally I was never a fan. However I do appreciate that it is something. Someone, outisde America, had the balls to take action.
You still didn't propose a solution. You just said you want to regulate advertising industry but how will you do that?
There is a clear precedent that fining doesn't stop companies and political systems won't overfine. So are you going to fine companies more? Are you going to limit the number of fines and dissolve the company? Are you going to propose another GDPR-eiqsque but for advertising? Because GDPR helped big companies - especially ad networks. What happens when companies become too big (as if they aren't already)? Do you really believe government can always do what it wants with the big companies?
No. History has proved it wrong multiple times. Companies used to slave and colonize countries. Today, they probably won't do that. They can just push misinformation and change behavior by manipulating what you see/hear/read. They are going to affect your government officials and policy makers. Those use facebook and google too probably. Your president use twitter, are twitter's algorithm manipulating him? Have you seen his feed? What if his feed is an echo chamber?
What is the actual regulation? I am not against change but if you don't specify how, then I am not sure it's a conversation worth having. Everyone wants things to change. Some people would like if everyone moved to fb. But without explaining your position with actual stats, how your solution will likely affect the problems, how am I going to differentiate your proposal from several thousands asking for more consolidation i.e opposite of what you are asking.
Not fines, but the potential for litigation brought by end users with potential for unpredictable damages. This is what creates fear in companies and forces them to change their behaviour to avoid.
Other industries have to contend with the threat of such lawsuits. Big tech is mostly free from such threats.
This is not "my" solution. This is "a" solution. You only want specifics so you can shoot it down.
If online advertising was regulated, e.g., prohibited, then it would take away some of the incentive for Facebook and Google to profit from data collected from/on users. We already saw this "no advertising" rule in effect when commercial use of the early internet was prohibited. AFAIK it was not backed by any legislation. We saw the Google founders release their work as an academic project vowing to combat internet advertising. We saw the Facebook founders disagreeing over whether to show ads. We can see how things played out. The temptation of onlne ads was just too great. Now they are beholden to Wall Street to keep up the surveillance and keep selling ads.
This time around, we could permit commercial transactions, including "e-commerce", but we could prohibit the use of the internet to advertise with violations giving way to not just fines, but potential for lawsuits from end users against advertisers and anyone selling online ads or online ad services.
I have never heard any argument that claimed that what Facebook does is valuable only if they are allowed to use the data they collect in any way they choose. If Facebook was simply a service to allow users to have a page on the Facebook website, and the company was not allowed to conduct surveillance and give third parties (e.g., advertisers) access to those users, I think users would still find Facebook valuable.
If users would not pay for such a service, then the problem is Facebook's, not users'. This is why "Facebook will always be free." It must be free. Otherwise users would find other free solutions.
I believe were Facebook to begin charging fees, we would still find ways to use the web to share photos/video and exchange messages with each other, through a website, for free. Facebook could prove me wrong by charging fees to all their users and letting us see what happens. They will not do that. They are afraid to test their monetary worth to end users.
It is the same story with Google, their search engine and all the works they acquired from third parties, which users often believe Google developed in-house. Those "services" have value to users apart from being vehicles in which Google collects more data and otherwise strengthens their online ad services business.
The aim of this legislation would be to force companies wishing to do business on the internet to sell, for money, something of value to users (cf. third parties) instead of simply operating as middlemen conducting surveillance for the benefit of third parties. No more "user is the product".
Now let's hear about your solution. After all, you stated "Everyone wants things to change" and that must include you.
Furthermore, the ads crowded out any investment in a micropayment solution that might provide an alternative to monetizing websites. They have a monopoly on financing the websites we use daily. The internet will continue to get worse until we can bypass the tech giants to pay for our web sites.
People in the 1990's who wanted "e-commerce" got their wish. Certain companies and individuals have become wealthy beyond imagination. Companies are hording cash. However it is not an equal playing field.
Governments have heretofore been unwilling to regulate. Some, those who are proifiting from the status quo, might say this is starting to change. Even if this is true, the change is very slow. In Mozilla Corporation's domicile, there has been no significant change.
Mozilla is funded indirectly by advertising. Their funding comes from Google. Google's funding comes from advertisers.