[RD] Bannon v. Google: We’ll See in D.C.

[cardgame]

But that would give them a monopoly on the dumb pipes market! Just say no to the dumb pipes monopoly!

I feel like you're being facetious, but they do have monopolies all across america.

Not sure nationalization is the best idea but it's far from the worst.

 

[Samson]

Punitive taxes on advertisement sales, revenues going to open source software development and tax credits for people paying for ad-free internet services.

That is some interesting ideas, but how do you deal with offshoring? It would be very easy for google to move head offices to anywhere while keeping their main software development in the bay area. I am kind of surprised they have not done it already, with the pressure that has been put on them by the US government.

 

[Zelig]

That is some interesting ideas, but how do you deal with offshoring? It would be very easy for google to move head offices to anywhere while keeping their main software development in the bay area. I am kind of surprised they have not done it already, with the pressure that has been put on them by the US government.

Tax whatever legal entity Alphabet has in the US based on $ value of ads showing to Americans, based on their best geotargeting data. Make Google hand over all their ad/geo data for audit purposes. Or maybe tax American companies who buy ads directly, not much point in buying ads targeting Americans if you don't have a sales presence in the country.

Edit: To be clear, I haven't really thought any of this through at all, so these are really ideas, and not proclamations of what I think would work.

 

[Farm Boy]

Punitive taxes on advertisement sales, revenues going to open source software development and tax credits for people paying for ad-free internet services.

Well, more conventional would require certain prohibitions on what sorts of user data could be sold under what conditions, to who, and for what, right? Assuming it can't be provented from being collected, of course. Then you control the commerce. Like gangsters. Everything become sort of like them if you write in enough power on their part as an assumption. You can't prevent the sale of illegal things, and you can't always find the sale or the illegal things, but if somebody has too much money from things that aren't legal to do, theoretically you can crush their tits on laundering.

 

[El_Machinae]

Well, the first step is allowing researchers access to the sorting algorithms. The same way I am allowed to see how the water is tested by my water supplier.

All of their power is in the sorting methodology. That's a LOT of power to implicitly control people. And right now, the only people in charge are shareholders.

Another would be to open up the quantities of advertising spent based on the selection criteria. Even raw numbers.

Riddle me this, if Facebook had intentionally brought up advertising 'in the form of those 'And Now This' stories that implicitly dissuaded young black men from voting ... how would we know?

It used to be, if you wanted to run ads that discouraged people from voting, the ads themselves were aired publicly. And we could see the scumminess and deride it. But we live in a world of targeted political ads hidden as news stories. That's soooooo scary.

 

[civvver]

That's one of the things google is being sued for, I think in Germany, might be Belgium or somewhere else. They're being sued for unfairly presenting search results to lead shoppers to their own sites over competitors.

 

[Samson]

Tax whatever legal entity Alphabet has in the US based on $ value of ads showing to Americans, based on their best geotargeting data. Make Google hand over all their ad/geo data for audit purposes. Or maybe tax American companies who buy ads directly, not much point in buying ads targeting Americans if you don't have a sales presence in the country.

Edit: To be clear, I haven't really thought any of this through at all, so these are really ideas, and not proclamations of what I think would work.

If we could do this I agree that it would be a good solution. The fact that no country has so far managed seems to indicate it is not so easy. I do not understand why it is so hard, and more effort into finding a way would be well justifed by any country that does not have most of the world's internet companies.

 

[BvBPL]

you don't have to use facebook, I don't use facebook. I use google but there are options. You have to have internet.

Avoiding Google is incredibly hard to do. Even if you avoid its most prominent services, the search engine and You Tube, you will still be tagged by its advertising arm. Facebook and Google together comprise 65% of the internet advertising industry, and 99% of the year over year growth between Q3 ’15 and Q3 ’16. Google in particular is so broad in scope that it is incredibly difficult to avoid interacting with it.

Internet advertising is fundamentally different from print, radio, or TV advertising because internet advertising acts on the consumer’s device to collect personal information. If you see a print ad in a periodical, you send no information back to the advertiser unless you choose to reach out to the advertiser. However, internet ads collect personal information about the consumer and continue to do so even after the consumer has moved past the ad even without the consumer’s say so. So just saying, “don’t use them” doesn’t cut it. You can’t use much of the internet without giving Google information about you.

I mean, Bannon's not wrong, at least not in theory or whatever. Twitter should probably be treated the same way. But I would probably prefer the status quo to allowing the Trump administration to write the rules.

Rejecting progression towards a desired end merely because someone you personally dislike shares the same goal isn’t a real great way to effect change. Better to work towards common interests.

 

[Lexicus]

Rejecting progression towards a desired end merely because someone you personally dislike shares the same goal isn’t a real great way to effect change. Better to work towards common interests.

I don't trust these people I "personally dislike" (I dislike them because they are Nazis, it's not really personal) to "progress towards a desired end" at all. I don't believe I have any common interests with Steve Bannon and so there is nothing to work toward.

 

[Zelig]

Avoiding Google is incredibly hard to do. Even if you avoid its most prominent services, the search engine and You Tube, you will still be tagged by its advertising arm. Facebook and Google together comprise 65% of the internet advertising industry, and 99% of the year over year growth between Q3 ’15 and Q3 ’16. Google in particular is so broad in scope that it is incredibly difficult to avoid interacting with it.

I don't allow anything from Google or Facebook to download on any webpage I visit. It's not that difficult.

If you see a print ad in a periodical, you send no information back to the advertiser unless you choose to reach out to the advertiser.

That's mostly how the web works from a technical perspective. It's up to the user agent (browser, in most cases) to decide whether to send any information to the advertiser, or whether to view the ad at all. Users who choose an agent (Chrome) produced by the advertiser (Google) are really inviting conflicts of interest.

 

[BvBPL]

Yes, it is possible to limit interaction with advertisers. A serious concern is that, on the internet, the default is to enable those interactions. Turning those interactions off is not always easy. Regulation could easily just make that behavior an opt-in for consumers.

 

[Zelig]

It's not trivial, but it's certainly easy. There's nothing conceptually difficult or time-consuming about it, just a lack of awareness. Any half-competent computer user can follow the required steps.

 

[uppi]

Tax whatever legal entity Alphabet has in the US based on $ value of ads showing to Americans, based on their best geotargeting data.

With the global nature of the internet, this would be extremely hard to set up in a loophole-free way. I would imagine that Alphabet would stop selling ads themselves and set up technically independent offshore companies that sell the ads and pay a heavy "license fee" to get input from Google where to put the ads.

Or maybe tax American companies who buy ads directly, not much point in buying ads targeting Americans if you don't have a sales presence in the country.

That might work. It would still be quite tricky to handle ads bought by a company in country A from another company in country B actually targeting customers in country C. You would need a lot of laws and you would need international cooperation to close all the loopholes.

But let's assume that this can be successfully implemented. You could make ads so unprofitable that nobody would want to display them (in that case you might as well ban them outright). But as long as there is still profit to be made, this is unlikely to break the hold of Google and Facebook on the advertising market. If the profit margin on your ads is quite slim, you will try even harder to target them as accurately as possible. And the companies providing the best targeting are those with the most knowledge about the visitors - Google and Facebook.

Well, the first step is allowing researchers access to the sorting algorithms. The same way I am allowed to see how the water is tested by my water supplier.

All of their power is in the sorting methodology. That's a LOT of power to implicitly control people. And right now, the only people in charge are shareholders.

Another would be to open up the quantities of advertising spent based on the selection criteria. Even raw numbers.

I have heard this demand of public scrutiny for the algorithms quite often and superficially, it sounds good. But I believe that it is based on misconceptions about how these algorithms work. "Selection criteria" sounds like there are people handcrafting rules how to roll out ads and these criteria are easily understandable to humans. Most likely this is not the case at all. Instead, I strongly suspect that Google and Facebook take more or less generic machine learning algorithms and throw huge amounts of data and computing power at them. They then tune some very technical parameters to get the best results. This means that the algorithms are probably very interesting from a technical point of view, but without the data, quite boring socially. Researchers having access to the algorithms would probably conclude that these are very sophisticated algorithms that are very good at solving certain classes of problems, but without the data, they would not be able to say what it actually does.

Sharing the data in addition to the algorithms is extremely problematic (It's bad enough what Google knows about you, but everyone else knowing all that as well is worse, in my opinion). But even if you have the data (and you are able to process it), you are unlikely to make any discoveries like "You need to tune this parameter to make the algorithm less racist", because machine-learning algorithms tend to be quite a black box: You put data in and get results out, but it is nigh impossible to state why exactly the output of the algorithm was what it was. I doubt that even the developers of the algorithms are capable of remove racist bias from them.

 

[Zelig]

You would need a lot of laws and you would need international cooperation to close all the loopholes.

Seems like an enforcement problem to me. Start issuing arrest warrants for execs if their companies take actions that are done primarily for tax purposes, regardless of those actions' general legality.

But let's assume that this can be successfully implemented. You could make ads so unprofitable that nobody would want to display them (in that case you might as well ban them outright). But as long as there is still profit to be made, this is unlikely to break the hold of Google and Facebook on the advertising market.

The part of my post that you didn't quote, about what to do with the profits, addressed this. If there aren't enough profits for that, dip into general revenue. The only real losers are Google/Facebook shareholders.

 

[El_Machinae]

It's not trivial, but it's certainly easy. There's nothing conceptually difficult or time-consuming about it, just a lack of awareness. Any half-competent computer user can follow the required steps.

It's a question of nudging. You can feel superior to a grandma trying to keep in touch with her family, with all of your knowledge. But we either implicitly let a shareholder-run psuedomonopoly have a great deal of power over her, or we give her power over the monopoly.

 

[BvBPL]

It's not trivial, but it's certainly easy. There's nothing conceptually difficult or time-consuming about it, just a lack of awareness. Any half-competent computer user can follow the required steps.

A lack of awareness isn't an excuse to assume people want their privacy invaded. You assume it is easy for you, but consider how difficult it would be describe it to a seventy year old user. This is why organizations like the ACLU are pushing for statutory protections.

 

[Zelig]

I never implied that we should accept the status quo wrt Google/Facebook privacy, just that I don't accept that avoiding their intrusions is "incredibly difficult".

Similarly, it's pretty easy to avoid eating at McDonald's, but that doesn't mean we should be catering to fast food interests.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I never implied that we should accept the status quo wrt Google/Facebook privacy, just that I don't accept that avoiding their intrusions is "incredibly difficult".

Similarly, it's pretty easy to avoid eating at McDonald's, but that doesn't mean we should be catering to fast food interests.

I think that their point, which seems valid, is that you are in no position to judge how "easy" it might be.

I was just paid a day's wage for changing out a toilet. I could suggest that it is ridiculous that someone would pay me for that, because it is just too easy. But, it is much more accurate to say that it is easy for me. The person who paid me doesn't have a truck. They probably wouldn't know if they could lift the box the new unit came in onto a cart at Home Depot or then onto a truck if they had one. They also wouldn't know whether they could lift off the old one. They might be intimidated if they read the instructions and came across the mind bendingly stupid "tighten the bolts, but don't overtighten," a problem I avoid by only reading the instructions for entertainment value after the job is done.

In short, I have no way to say how easy or difficult it is objectively. And in regards to computer related things my immediate response is "well, Zelig says it is easy, but so what." Take that as respect.