Thread by @doctorow

Big Tech steals from the news, but it doesn't steal *content* - it steals *money*. That matters, because creating copyrights over the news facts, headlines, or snippets to help news companies bargain with tech makes the news *partners* with tech, rather than watchdogs.

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

pluralistic.net/2023/05/31/con…

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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).

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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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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.

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Those companies 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.

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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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The #AMERICAAct from @SenMikeLee would force ad giants to divest themselves of business units that create conflicts of interest. It's popular, bipartisan legislation.

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I *do* mean bipartisan; its backers include @SenWarren 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:

eff.org/deeplinks/2023…

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

eff.org/deeplinks/2023…

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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.

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You know these ads: search for shoes and every website you land on is plastered in shoe ads.

Surveillance ads require a vast, multi-billion-dollar surveillance dragnet, tracking you as you physically move through the world, and digitally, as you move through the web.

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Your apps, your phone and your browser are constantly gathering data on your activities to feed the ad-tech industry.

This data is incredibly dangerous.

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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.

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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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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.

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When users get a choice to opt out of spying, they do. #Apple gave #Ios users an opt-out of tracking and *96%* of users clicked it (the other 4% were confused, or on Facebook's payroll). It cost Facebook $10b in the first *year*. You love to see it:

cnbc.com/2022/02/02/fac…

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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:

pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/lux…

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Companies that stop spying on us don't do so because of their character. They stop because of regulation and competition - the fear 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.

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That's why we need a *legal* ban on ads, not billboards touting companies' "respect" for privacy. The US is overdue for privacy law with a private right of action, so we can sue firms that violate it, even if prosecutors won't go to bat for us:

eff.org/deeplinks/2019…

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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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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.

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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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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?"

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

pluralistic.net/2022/04/29/tak…

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.

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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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Behavioral ad marketplaces have high barriers to entry, requiring troves of surveillance data on billions of internet users.

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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.

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

So contextual ads will show up for more users, and more of the money they generate will land in news publishers' pockets.

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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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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.

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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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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:

eff.org/deeplinks/2023…

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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
eff.org/deeplinks/2023…

CC BY 3.0:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.…

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