The problem with many digital ad conversations is modern capitalism has bent our society into thinking that earning money makes a company virtuous... but there are many ad tech companies that are built on nothing but fraud. Billions of dollars built on entirely imaginary value.
The ad tech ecosystem grew in product count from 100ish to over 8,000 in just a decade. That isn't real growth. Those aren't real profits. It's fraud built on top of misleading metrics built on top of BS. A stack of fictitious capital only barely held up by user data.
Ad tech firms will demand that the share they cull from user data, or even really from the illusion of user data, somehow be maintained for them. Because they claim profit is intrinsically good t/f it most be preserved. Profit is not intrinsically good for society.
But most of these middlemen are just leaches. Providing no value, but sucking revenue out of the in-between black box, the 70% of revenue that disappears into their coffers between the buyer and the seller. But regulators shouldn't look at this as something to preserve...
Ad tech middlemen's 70% share of digital advertising isn't something to preserve, we need not concern ourselves with it when we consider how to reform advertising. It is a sickness, a symptom of an ill system, one of the very things we need to correct.
That privacy fractures these middle-men's illusion of value by robbing them of the ability to even claim they can make user data useful is merely incidental to creating a more private web, but it is a useful side effect.
That privacy can help us prune the ad tech ecosystem is a useful win/win in an ecosystem badly in need of having its bubble popped for the health and safety of the internet and our world.
https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/1078018209536708609
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
