We need to think of the internet as a public utility. How absurd would it be if every time you used water in your home, you heard an advertisement playing from a speaker in the faucet.
It's a very important point; this false argument is often used. In truth, in the marketplace, goods are not priced at 'cost-plus'; i.e., they aren't priced by taking the cost to the vendor and adding a profit margin.
Goods are priced at the point that will maximize profit for the vendor; economists would say at the point that maximizes marginal profit. Colloquially, they charge as much as they can.
The fact that the vendor has another stream of income from Product B doesn't cause them to reduce their prices for Product A. Microsoft doesn't cut the price of Windows because they are making so much from Office.
Microsoft did cut the price of Windows to get people to adopt it early on because they would be making so much money from Office.
Microsoft Word vs. WordPerfect, Excel vs. Quattro Pro and Lotus 1-2-3. These battles were won because of Windows and that cemented their position as industry leader.
Now that Microsoft is in a dominant position they don't cut the price of Windows as much, but to remain on top they do give the OEMs a very sweet per-unit deal they really can't refuse.
Same with Internet. Back in the days I had a plan like that, where Internet would be faster and wouldn't count towards your quota if used in the night. All the heavy downloads would be scheduled to run overnight
Almost certainly.
Take all the content available to a cable subscriber, and the money that goes into producing that content. Take out the ads and split the bill (in addition to the relatively low costs of operating/maintaining the cable company itself) among the subscribers. That's just covering costs; now add a bit of profit to motivate those companies to stay in business.
There's no question you'd be paying more - a lot more. We just don't think the ads are saving us money because we don't know any different - that's just the way TV has been since the beginning.
Those poor people will pay one way or another. Given the indirectness and inefficiency involved in the advertising approach, I wager they'll pay more that way. And it'll be less fair: people with less willpower will pay more.
Advertising makes sense when direct payment is impractical. Broadcast TV is the classic example. It's really hard to charge money for it, so ads let you indirectly collect money from your viewers. On the internet, paywalls are practical technologically, but tend to add too much friction, so we get ads instead. But there's no reason for it here.
Yeah, but internet advertising fetishizes "personalization" and quantitative metrics, which are predicated on invasions of privacy. Advertisers could put those toys down, and go back to more traditional, privacy-preserving advertising, but I don't think they have the maturity and willpower to do so on their own.
Can be done... rates would have to go down below TV to work and even so will be attractive only for big advertizers (think billions in sales).. Smaller advertisers would have no interest in the medium without targeting
Mozilla attempted this on the Firefox home page. Nobody understood the point (partly Mozilla's fault for poor messaging) and it was roundly criticized for putting advertising in the browser, instead of providing a solution to funding websites without violating privacy.
Regardless, the end payment is the same, it's just a question about how you want to pay.
Edit: For those who think this may be a money grab, remember that the government is getting tax revenue out of the profits ISPs make from monetizing your data. While the ethics of this are debatable, the alternative is zero additional government revenue. So the ethics of privacy need to be weighed against the ethics of providing programs for communities that could be beneficial.
As for the gov't getting tax revenue from selling the information, that's just unpersuasive. First, it's an incredibly indirect way of getting the revenue, and second that could be used to justify any profit-making activity, which makes it meaningless.
Second, lets imagine that poor people would prefer whipping instead of imprisonment (they can return to work sooner) or fine.
Should we follow the same logic here then and accept it?
Being poor is not a crime.
No one complained about this.
So now the idea is privacy is a commodity to be purchased, and freedom from ads is a commodity to be purchased. It's every man for himself, that leads to more distrust, less cooperation, and more acrimony and I think it's incompatible with a civil society. This classist variety of Republican/conservative/capitalist - whatever label to put on it - is vile. It's neo-aristocracy, and it's anti-democratic.
Are we going to see where - if you run such software - suddenly you can't browse any sites, or you can only browse very slowly?
Or will running ad-blocking software be considered illegal or something - because you're depriving potential profit from somebody?
Will ads slowly take over the entire experience? To the point where you just don't want to use the internet any longer (or at least the web)?
Will people move back to gopher and ftp (oh, we can only hope)? BBSs? Door games and MUDs to the rescue?
My wife and I have considered moving to a more rural area of our state - we're both tired of the city and of people in general. I've lamented about how out in such areas, internet service would be spotty or non-existent, but you know what?
Maybe that's a good thing, ultimately. If I need internet for some reason, I'll just mosey into town, send an email or two, then mosey back home.
These advertisers, their enablers, ISPs, and the corrupt political machine that supports it all? They can go f--- themselves.
And quite frankly, for a of people, they're probably right. Especially because people don't understand what they are giving up, because it somehow has to do with "computers" and are therefore different from real life.
If, however you were to explain to a person, that this would be the same as his landlord knowing every single step he took in his home, when he took that step, what he was listening to when he took the step, who he was taking the step with, exactly how he looked when he took the step and use it to shoe advertising, he would cry foul and he would understand that this was not a small thing.
Why can't we have Ads vs. Privacy? Income for Comcast can come from either at the cost of serving ads OR at the cost of privacy--not both. What the fuck?
