Mastodawn

Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

Big Tech steals from the news, but what it steals isn't *content* - it steals *money*. That matters, because if we create pseudo-copyrights over the facts of the news, or headlines, or snippets to help news companies bargain with tech companies, we make the news *partners* with the tech companies, rather than watchdogs.

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this to read/share, here' it is on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/31/context-ads/#class-formation

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Pluralistic: To save the news, ban surveillance ads (31 May 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

How does tech steal money from the news? Lots of ways! One important one: tech steals ad revenue. 51% of every ad dollar gets gobbled up by tech companies - primarily the cozy, collusive #AdTech duopoly of #Google/#Facebook (AKA #Googbook). If we can shatter the market power of the concentrated ad-tech industry, news companies would go back to getting 80-90% of the ad revenue their reporting generated, which would pay for more reporting.

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

There's lots to like about fixing ads. For one thing, a fair ad marketplace would benefit *all* news reporting, not just the largest news companies - which are dominated by #PrivateEquity-backed chains and right-wing billionaires who have repeatedly shown that any additional revenues will go to pay shareholders, not more reporters.

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Fair ads would also provide an income for reporters who strike out on their own, covering local politics or specific beats, without making themselves sharecroppers for Big Media.

One way to fix ads would be to break up the ad-tech "stacks." Googbook both operate impossibly conflicted ad-placement businesses in which they bargain with themselves on behalf of both advertisers *and* publishers, with the winners *always* being the tech companies.

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

The #AMERICAAct from #SenatorMikeLee would force ad giants to divest themselves of business units that create conflicts of interest. It's popular, bipartisan legislation - and I *do* mean bipartisan; its backers include #ElizabethWarren and #TedCruz! I wrote about the AMERICA Act and the role it will play in saving news from tech for @eff's Deeplinks Blog last week:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

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To Save the News, We Must Shatter Ad-Tech

This is part two of an ongoing, five-part series. Part one, the introduction, is here. Part three, about banning surveillance ads, is here. Part four, about opening up app stores, is here. Part five, about enshrining "end-to-end" delivery on social media, is here. Download this whole series as a...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

This week, I've got a followup about another important way to unrig the ad market: banning #SurveillanceAds:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Even if we break up the ad-tech stacks, ads will still be bad for the news - and for the public. That's because the dominant form of digital ads is "#BehavioralAdvertising" - the ad-tech sector's polite euphemism for ads based on spying. You know these ads: you search for shoes and then every website you land on is plastered in shoe ads.

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To Save the News, We Must Ban Surveillance Advertising

This is part three of an ongoing, five-part series. Part one, the introduction, is here. Part two, about breaking up ad-tech companies, is here. Part four, about opening up app stores, is here. Part five, about enshrining "end-to-end" delivery on social media, is here. Download this whole series as...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

Surveillance ads require a massive, multi-billion-dollar surveillance dragnet, one that tracks you as you physically move through the world, and digitally, as you move through the web. Your apps, your phone and your browser are constantly gathering data on your activities to feed the ad-tech industry.

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

This data is incredibly dangerous. There's so much of it, and it's so loosely regulated, that every spy, cop, griefer, stalker, harasser, and identity thief can get it for pennies and use it however they see fit. The ad-tech industry poses a risk to protesters, to people seeking reproductive care, to union organizers, and to vulnerable people targeted by scammers.

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

Ad-tech maintains the laughable pretense that all this spying is consensual, because you clicked "I agree" on some garbage-novella of impenatrable legalese that no one - not even the ad-tech companies' lawyers - has ever read from start to finish. But when people are given a real choice to opt out of digital spying, they do.

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

#Apple gave #Ios users a one-click opt-out of in-app tracking and *96%* of users clicked it (the other 4% must have been confused - or on Facebook's payroll). The decision cost Facebook $10b in the first *year*. You love to see it:

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html

But here's the real punchline: Apple blocked Facebook from spying on its customers, but *Apple* kept spying on them, just as invasively as Facebook had, in order to target them with Apple's own ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

The thing that stops companies from spying on us isn't the strength of their character, it's the discipline imposed by regulation and competition - the fear that they'll get fined more than they make from spying, and the fear that they'll lose so much business from spying that they'll end up in the red.

Which is why we need a *legal* ban on ads, not mere platitudes on billboards advertising companies' "respect" for our privacy.

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

The US is way overdue for a federal privacy law with a private right of action, which would let you and me sue the companies who violated it, even if no public prosecutor was willing to go to bat for us:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

A privacy law that required companies to get your affirmative, enthusiastic, ongoing, specific, informed consent to gather and process your personal data would end surveillance ads forever.

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You Should Have a Private Right of Action to Sue Companies That Violate Your Privacy

It is not enough for government to pass laws that protect consumers from corporations that harvest and monetize their personal data. It is also necessary for these laws to have bite, to ensure companies do not ignore them. The best way to do so is to empower ordinary consumers to bring their own...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

Despite the self-serving nonsense the ad-tech industry serves up about people "liking relevant ads," no one wants to be spied on. 96% of Ios users don't lie.

A ban on surveillance ads wouldn't just serve the public, it would also save the news. The alternative to surveillance ads is #ContextAds: ads based on what a reader is reading, rather than what that reader was *doing*.

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

Context-based ad marketplaces ask, "What am I bid for this Pixel 6 user in Boise who is reading about banana farming?" instead of "What am I bid for this 22 year old man who recently searched for information about suicidal ideation and bankruptcy protection?"

Context ads perform a little worse than surveillance ads - by about 5%:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/29/taken-in-context/#creep-me-not

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Pluralistic: 29 Apr 2022 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

So presumably advertisers won't pay as much for context ads as they do for behavioral targeting. But that doesn't mean that the *news* will lose money. Because context ads favor publishers over ad-tech platforms - no publisher will ever know as much about internet users as spying ad-tech giants do, but no tech company will ever know as much about a publisher's content as the publisher does.

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

Behavioral ad marketplaces have high barriers to entry, requiring troves of surveillance data on billions of internet users. They are naturally anticompetitive and able to command a much higher share of each ad dollar than a contextual ad service (which would have much more competiition) could.

On top of that: if behavioral advertising was limited to people who truly consented to it, 96% of users would never see an ad!

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

So contextual ads will show up for more users, and more of the money they generate will land in news publishers' pockets. If context ads fetch less money per ad, the losses will be felt by ad-tech companies, not publishers.

Finally: publishers who join the fight against surveillance ads won't be alone - they'll be joining with a massive, popular movement against commercial surveillance.

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

The news business is - and always has been - a niche subject, of burning interest to publishers, reporters, and a small minority of news junkies. The news on its own is a small fry in policy debates. But when it comes to killing surveillance ads, the news has a class alliance with the mass movement for privacy, and together, they're a force to reckon with.

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Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

My article on killing surveillance ads is part three of an ongoing, five-part series for EFF on how we save the news from tech. The introduction, which sets out the whole series, is here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

The final two parts will come out over the next two weeks, and then we're going to publish the whole thing as a PDF that suitable for sharing. Watch this space!

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Image:
EFF
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

CC BY 3.0:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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Saving the News From Big Tech

Download this whole series as a single PDF.Media is in crisis: newsrooms all over the world are shuttering and the very profession of journalism is under sustained ideological and physical assault. Freedom of the press is a hollow doctrine if the only news media is written or published by...

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Ahmet Alphan Sabancı May 31, 2023

@pluralistic Can we translate it when it’s complete? I’d like to translate it into Turkish and publish on our NGO @newslabturkey’s website.

Cory Doctorow May 31, 2023

@ahmetasabanci @newslabturkey Yes! All EFF materials are CC BY 3.0, and my personal blog posts on Pluralistic.net are CC BY 4.0

Ahmet Alphan Sabancı Jun 1, 2023

@pluralistic @newslabturkey great, we use the same CC licenses too.