Prepare yourself for ads from amorphous organizations with names like The Committee to Re-Establish Democracy or The Project for a New American Freedom. (No idea if these are real, I just made them up.) I suppose it helps to see precisely who is paying for an advertisement, but I don’t think this is actually useful in a real sense.
The only long-term solution is education: foster a sense of skepticism towards all advertising and encourage reading information from a variety of viewpoints. Of course, Google’s entire existence (and having destroyed traditional media’s business model, the media itself) is predicated on ads, so don’t expect anything this lucid soon.
> I suppose it helps to see precisely who is paying for an advertisement, but I don’t think this is actually useful in a real sense.
Think from the perspective of an advertiser. Earlier, an advertiser could pay for any ad anonymously. Now any ad you want to show can be traced back to you. This is a meaningful difference. Even if you as a viewer can't pinpoint the specific person behind an ad, they are not completely anonymous anymore (to Google, to law enforcement that may have a warrant, etc). Of course, this change comes at the cost of a reduction in freedom from the lack of anonymity.
Ad targeting still allows you to fly under the radar of someone who could investigate by only targeting the ad to the idiots that would swallow it whole and not ask questions while everyone else is completely oblivious to the ad's existence.
In fact I'm pretty sure this is happening already regardless of these changes. I recently saw on Reddit that YouTube is promoting ads for very obvious gift card scams, even though I've personally never seen any of those in the few times my ad blocker let me down. Presumably this is because those ads are only targeted to a certain subset of people to both maximise ROI as well as avoid being shown to someone smart enough to identify it as a scam and potentially report it and blow up the whole operation.
A good start (besides banning the cancer that is advertising) would be to have all advertising platforms publish a searchable archive of every ad, who paid for it and the targeting criteria. This means people can at least look behind the curtain and see which ads are out there that they wouldn't normally see due to the targeting criteria not matching them.
> (besides banning the cancer that is advertising)
Not all advertising (especially in the broad sense of the word) is bad. There is one ad in particular in the last year that I'm very glad I saw, because it alerted me to the existence of a product that has provided a lot of value to me. Of course, most advertising nowadays is trash and the web is barely usable without an ad-blocker, but in principle, I think having unobtrusive ads for vetted products isn't such a bad thing.
Unless there is a government identification with photo of a real person associated with the ad, there is no transparency. Shell corporations and complex ownership structures will obscure any attempt at tracking the source otherwise.
Corporate structure should be public data and involve real people with verified identities, yes?
Anything that reduces the difficulty of tracing should be seen as an improvement. It's a long road from here to perfection, but that's no reason not to take a step.
Definitely this policy is an improvement, but many of the worst offenders have more than sufficient resources to avoid any impact from this change. It's already the norm for political organizations to adopt entirely useless names. What's the difference between "People for the American Way" and "Citizens United?" And these are both decades-old organizations, not a modern occurrence.
Various regulations (some hinging on direct involvement in electoral advocacy) require various degrees of disclosure of funding sources and beneficial owners, but the system is uneven and often minimally enforced. In practice I expect a huge number of legal entities running advertising whose operators cannot readily be ascertained. This is already the case with groups like Metric Media Foundation where a good degree of investigative journalism was required to figure out who was pulling the strings.
Compliance rules could be extended to include due diligence on partners, and block contracts and payments to and from entities that have no clear ownership.
It could but realistically it's unlikely to happen. Nobody would ever accept taking responsibility for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of partners, and the expenses involved in validating every last one of them. Not to mention the lost business on either side. Even the IRS or banks can't keep up with long ownership chains or properly identifying customers and they have a more vested interest.
Laws and rules are far slower to adapt than the workarounds that bend them. And clear ownership says little. Everything can simply point to a more or less real identity that nobody will ever find.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against such rules. I'm just saying that the likelihood of them achieving the results we imagine are slim.
How hard is a policy stating maximum of n-levels depth of nested ownership allowed and any kind of cyclical ownership causes loss of control in both ways?
It's hard because non-fraudulent corporations commonly have very complicated ownership structures. The global corporation owns the US subsidiary which owns the Auto subsidiary which owns Auto Parts subsidiary which owns the Northeast Region Auto Parts subsidiary which owns a subsidiary that makes transmissions which owns a subsidiary that makes warranties for transmissions etc. etc. The level of complexity necessary to confound an external investigation is not inherently less than the level of complexity that exists in legitimate real corporations.
Corporate ownership is also traded as a commodity. The US Auto Parts Northeast Region Transmissions Warranty subsidiary is required to hold assets sufficient to bond the warranties it issues, so instead of keeping a large pile of hundred dollar bills on the coffee table, it holds shares of the parent company and you now have circular ownership. If the parent company is loaded up with debt then you might find that the subsidiaries like that own the majority or entirety of the parent company -- without even necessarily realizing it.
You also have the problem that people willing to commit fraud are willing to commit fraud. Convince some credulous victim that all they have to do is put in $1000 and sign some papers and they can invest in The Next Big Thing and they've not only scammed them out of $1000, now it's the victim's name on the shell corp.
Generally speaking identifying people who don't want to be identified is hard, the methods effective to do so oppress innocent people more than anything, and it is best to look to other solutions. For example, if you discover people are publishing misinformation, show the truth to the same people who saw the misinformation.
I'm just talking about the expectations. Writing the rule is not the difficult part. Enforcing them is because it's extra effort and expense and it leads to losing some business. Shareholders are more than happy to support a company's ethics until they stand in the way of profit.
Finding an appropriate n might be a delicate, many big (legitimate) businesses have really complicated ownership structures. Then you have to task someone with validating all of this. Whose expense is it to do the due diligence and check everything? WHo takes responsibility for failures in this regard? And finally it will mean some business is lost on both sides and it might be a lot of money.
Banks have anti money laundering policies yet still find ways to go around them all the time because they want the business. Banking secrecy wasn't there to protect privacy but to obscure shady activities. As I said, it's good to have the rule and I'm not against it but I have the feeling people have some unrealistic expectations from this. They just raise the bar a bit and filter out the "chaff" while still allowing larger interests to prevail.
> Finding an appropriate n might be a delicate, many big (legitimate) businesses have really complicated ownership structures
It is something between 10 and 13, if you accept that governance structure of an organisation must match its social communication structure. It is something between 14 and 16, if you accept that governance structure of an organisation must match its business divisions. Any n>16 is prone to communication shortcutting.
That could be defeatable by crowdsourced research into a common database non blockchain of course ;-) ) and a chrome extension to ad an info UI to every ad, and a Google feature to show you a restorspective look at id info of all ads they've served you recently.
yes, there's tension between transparency for businesses and privacy for individuals (which is the stance i support). on one hand, you want transparency to elucidate crime and even neglect and aggression. on the other, the people behind companies have the right to privacy as well, lest those people be unfairly attacked (e.g., planned parenthood workers). the best tradeoff is not obvious here.
> foster a sense of skepticism towards all advertising
Here, here. I would go further and say that human society needs a universal convention that flags paid speech as such, and gives people a clear protocol to filter any (or all) paid communication.
We already have laws saying that advertising must be marked as such. And the advertising companies are trying to make the marks as invisible as possible.
How little font size can you use? Maybe a size that a person with perfect eyesight can read, but older people cannot, and even the person with perfect eyesight would easily miss it, that is technically legal, isn't it? What if the font color is hard to distinguish from the background color? How far from the advertisement can the warning be placed? If there is a warning, and a small advertisement next to it, and then a longer unrelated text written in different visual style, but still on the same page, it is obvious that the warning applies also to that other text, right? Or, if you are Google, just say that "everyone knows" that the first two or three search results are paid for, so there is no reason to mark them explicitly.
(EDIT: What words should you use for the warning. "Advertisement?" "Sponsored links?" Is it okay to use some words that 90% of your readers would not be sure what they mean, but technically they mean what they are supposed to?)
Then there is the question of what exactly counts as "paid speech". If I send the money directly to you, obviously. If I instead send them to a charity you own? If there is no cash, but I give you hundred bottles of wine? Does it make a difference if you write wine reviews, and you use samples from my gift? If I send you a computer with pre-installed software that you review, and I tell you that you don't have to send the computer back when you are done? If I invite you for an expensive vacation... sorry, I meant "conference", paid by my company? Or what if I never give you anything, just offer to write the articles for you, so you can give them to your boss and take your salary without having to do any work? What if you actually pay me for writing the content, but I give you a discount if I can choose the topic? What if I offer free food for members of the press when they provide coverage for my event? What if no transaction ever happens, but I will simply provide coverage for my friends and ignore the people I don't know.
I am not sure if a clear line can actually be made here. Taken to extreme, even private bloggers would not be allowed to write blogs about topics they are interested in, without providing some disclaimer like "the topic of this article was not chosen impartially". That would be silly, wouldn't it? But then, everyone with more obvious conflict of interest will claim that their case is analogical to this.
Sounds like (a polarized) wanting a yes/no-solution.
Maybe for a speech solution you can use a transcript (speech to text converter) which stretches every possible text hyperlinking to (educating) extending webpages with further information hyperlinks, on a topic (wiki, translating pages,...) -what for sure let 'their' influence on you um grow and possibly become more polarized ? An example-try:
Methods:
language regulation,
using evaluative Words
telling shortend storys
repetition
boasting
hints ma(s)king half-truth to truth
So now, with that on your mind lets test the transcript adding hyperlinks using the named methods... (-;
If you filter the paid speech then it follows you should also filter out the actual art, cinema, theater, etc. it paid for. Now you are left with what?
People actually cook lunch for each other all the time without making a sales pitch, this idea that nothing happens if Google isn't cutting checks is an extremely dim view of humanity.
It isn't cynical but one which understands the value of specialization and ability to provide. If people cannot be supported doing X then doing better at it is limited.
Said paid approach also has implicit patronage as wealth reserves the priveledge to devote a large ammount of resources including time and not get paid for it while monopolizing the prestiege and related benefits of it.
Whoa, even when a comment is bad, please don't respond with a worse one. That just takes the thread further in the wrong direction. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I don't read the GP comment as being a jerk so much as trying to at least avoid the most unproductive kinds of argument. Maybe it was a doomed experiment.
Yes, it was something of an experiment. I knew that ignoring it was best but I had a lot of other reactions, and I'd never seen a comment like that before, so I gave it a shot. Live and learn!
Education is certainly one part, but we could also shift business models away from advertising. Ads are a cancer on content and attention, and the fact that so much of the economy is centered around them is mind boggling.
Ads are often the lowest hanging fruit for ROI. Is it often far easier (less time consuming, less resource intensive, less risky) to manipulate human perception at large into buying your product than providing a functionally better product. Techniques are well established and broad reaching across all domains since it focuses on the consumer's perception. There's a reason businesses pour so much money into marketing and advertising.
Even if you do provide a functionally better product/service than competitors, it's often easier for a competitor to convince consumers their product/service is better than your functionally better product/service, if nothing else, by hiding in ambiguity and complexity or well crafted claims that deceive consumers.
There's also the obvious case that if you have an overall better product/service, if people don't know about it, it's not likely to succeed by word-of-mouth alone (there are exceptions) so advertising to aide discovery provides a necessary function but not to the level of manipulative practices we have today (marketing) that are employing sophisticated psychological techniques and are now even driven by targeted behavior data.
It's one thing to inform people "Hey we made this, it exists, it does this, and here's the cost, you can get it here..." but it's another thing entirely to manipulate consumers perception or play on behavioral faults over--I don't know--delivering a product or service of genuine value?
Given modern business environments, it seems to me that it's often financially best to deliver the minimal functional product/service a consumer will accept and convince them its better than it is (manipulate perceived value). That, to me also, doesn't create a strong economy, it creates a system that helps disproportionately redistribute wealth to those who can (and will) play that game.
And manufacturing may be cheaper without worrying about polluting or waste dumping, but when those were no curtailed, manufacturing didn't stop, it just found better ways.
Banning advertising doesn’t make this problem go away unless you can also enforce it worldwide. If Google went away, you will have Baidu or Yandex pick up the business. Are we in a position to regulate them too?
Remember that ads existed before internet. They also had the same fundamental problems. Only those days one had to be rich to muck with society
It also doesn't solve the issue that ads are trying to address in the first place, which is to promote your business.
If you outright ban ads, they'll come back in a sneaky way, see influencer marketing / product placement in culture (movies mostly) for how it plays out.
It also prevents smaller businesses to compete with the larger ones because the larger ones have much more clout and branding power.
Not that it makes ads perfect, far from it. But at least ads are transparent unlike all the astro-turfing there is out there.
> Banning advertising doesn’t make this problem go away unless you can also enforce it worldwide.
It makes the problem go away to a certain degree in areas were ads are banned. If we banned ads in Europe and US, Russians using Yandex and Chinese people using Baidu would still see ads but we would not.
However we wouldn't see much at all for a while I guess since a number of big internet companies seem to be almost clueless when it comes to ordinary decent business models like "I pay you money, you provide me service without telling every shady tracker in the process.
So I'm not arguing for a ban on advertising as that is completely unrealistic, would hurt tje economy badly, woild be next to impossible to enforce and also counterproductive: I've seen ads that improved my day or even my life.
But I certainly wouldn't cried if someone had stopped WhatsApp from selling out to Facebook. And I certainly wouldn't have cried if online ads became more like ads in newspapers and magazines: static, doesn't move, doesn't make noise, doesn't send requests, embedded into the page server side instead of running giant multi-kilobyte applications in my browser.
Maybe I'd even stop blocking ads of they were less dumb, more relevant and didn't make my computer crawl.
But I wouldn't say that this leading to amorphous organizations means it's a failure.
It's giving clear ability to connect content you see with well established government legal frameworks. This can help internet ads follow similar level of scrutiny as traditional ads. Is that framework perfect? Of course not. But it's unified framework, with strong ownership (government), enforcement of best practices (judges), etc.
There's only as much as companies can do. Only small part of those problems is technical. Majority of the issues is much broader legal/free-speech issues, that I personally don't want any private, for profit company, to control. It doesn't mean that I'm excited and confident that governments will do it correctly (for sure they won't), but it's right framework to solve those problems.
Obviously if you are fundamentally against the concept of advertising then no version of AdWords will make you happy but.... isn't this change a good thing? Not perfect, but definitely good.
The only long-term solution is education: foster a sense of skepticism towards all advertising and encourage reading information from a variety of viewpoints. Of course, Google’s entire existence (and having destroyed traditional media’s business model, the media itself) is predicated on ads, so don’t expect anything this lucid soon.