Tag: Google

How About That Free Lunch Now

 

The great thing about the internet is that it is interactive; interactivity is also one of the bad things about the internet. When people read paper newspapers, way back when, they were exposed to advertisements paid for by commercial establishments in the news and features sections, and to classified advertisements paid for mostly by individuals or small businesses in a section of their own. Paper newspaper advertisements were interactive only in the sense that the reader could choose to ignore them. This was reasonably easy for the reader because the ads themselves did not hop up and down, yell and scream for attention, obfuscate the actual content of the newspaper for a period, or otherwise make a nuisance of themselves and detract from the peaceful enjoyment of the newspaper by the person who had paid a dime or a quarter for it.

When newspapers and writers of other content moved to the internet, they still needed to make a living, of course, and naturally they turned to advertisers to help fund their efforts. Since there was no pay model for the internet, such as had been the case in the days of paper newspapers when readers either subscribed for home delivery or paid directly at street corner kiosks, publishers relied even more heavily on advertisers for income. For some reason, people had gotten the notion that internet content should be free, and rightly or wrongly that’s the way things developed. Here is where the interactive part kicked in and started an internet arms race.

Bob Dylan performs his song “Mr. Tambourine Man” at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. Dylan’s guitar and harmonica rig is much like the getup buskers used then and today to make a few dollars for their efforts. All that’s missing here is the hat or guitar case for collecting money tossed in by passers by. Many small websites, like this one, have to either pass the hat by posting a “Donate” button, or hope for the best from advertising revenue, or both.

Advertisers realized that since the internet was interactive and didn’t just lie there waiting to wrap fish after it was published like the old paper newspapers did, they could do things to jazz up their ads and, they thought, readers would pay closer attention and the advertisers would see higher returns. Great! Not all advertisers, just the ones who lacked any restraint, got their ads to hop up and down, to yell and scream for attention, to obfuscate for a period the content the reader was actually there to see, and to otherwise make a nuisance of themselves in order to draw attention. It turns out people did not like that, particularly the ones with slow internet connections or limited bandwidth, which the sparkly new advertisements ate into, much to the hapless reader’s dismay. Enter software engineers with a retaliatory response.

The software engineers had some experience in combating opponents in the advertising field after having worked to swat away the pop up army of advertisements that plagued internet users in the early days. One thing many advertisers have never been known for is restraint. Now here they were again, but instead of pop ups they were employing twitchy, sparkly, pushy advertisements. The software engineers working on behalf of browser makers and internet users came up with ad blockers. Now all ads were blocked. Hah hah! Internet users had the option of whitelisting – or permitting – ads on a website in the options menu of their ad blocker, but who would ever bother to do that? Publishers noticed, however, that their internet ad revenue plummeted.

An emotionally fraught rendition of “Silver Springs” in a 1997 concert by Fleetwood Mac, which demonstrates why they continued to draw large crowds well after their heyday. The song, written and sung by Stevie Nicks, who as a songwriter ranks in the top echelon of 1970s and 1980s pop and soft rock, is a deeply personal revelation. Fleetwood Mac had by 1997 long passed their peak of popularity for album sales, but concert ticket prices for such an established group with an extensive catalog of hits remained high, from $20 to $50 for the cheap seats, to over $100 for the best seats. The internet works similarly, with an enormous underclass of websites barely making it, and several well established websites with large followings dominating the market.

Enter Google in the spring of 2017 with the Funding Choices program and their own ad blocker built into their Chrome browser, which in the past year has overtaken Microsoft’s Internet Explorer as the world’s most popular browser. But since Google makes the lion’s share of its revenue selling ads and marketing user information, why would Google then be against ads? Because the obnoxious ads that prompted the development of ad blockers have poisoned the well for everybody, and Google, with its dominant market position, can dictate which ads will fly and which ones won’t.

The Funding Choices program is geared toward internet users, telling them they can pay to subscribe to a publisher’s content and go ad free, or view the content free on condition they allow ads, which Google assures them they have vetted for good behavior. Google’s ad blocker built into its Chrome browser is geared toward advertisers, telling them essentially that unless they allow Google to vet their ads for good behavior, they will not see the light of day on the world’s most popular browser. All of this would seem a boon to both internet users and publishers. But that depends on how much they trust “Don’t Be Evil” Google. Rather than turn over yet more power to Google, a company which has already surpassed Microsoft in ways not only financial but morally suspect, perhaps the time has come for internet users to seek alternatives not only for search but for the multitude of other applications which Google has used to ingratiate itself as the public’s servant, the servant whose ear is always at the door. This website, for one, will seek alternatives to displaying Google ads. Oh, you weren’t even aware there were Google ads on this website?
― Techly

 

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We’ll Take That As a Yes

 

Last week the United States Congress voted to repeal new Federal Communications Commission rules which would have required that internet service providers (ISPs) notify their customers of the data they collect on them for their own commercial purposes unrelated to providing the service, and that customers had to specifically opt-in to the practice. The FCC voted 3 to 2 in favor of the new rules in October 2016, and they would have gone into effect on March 2 of this year had the FCC not stayed it on March 1 under new chairman Ajit Pai. Outgoing FCC chairman Tom Wheeler pushed for the new rules in order to spell out consumer privacy protections in relationship to ISPs, something which he and two of the other commissioners felt was inadequately addressed in Section 222 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

 

The Telecommunications Act goes back to 1934, when the original law went into effect creating the FCC and granting it the authority to regulate telecommunications companies as common carriers, which is to say the same as utilities. Section 222 of that law pertained to how the carriers could use their customers’ personal information, and it required them to keep the information confidential except as required by law or by consent of the customer. Congress has amended the Act periodically to reflect changes in technology, with the last major revision in 1996.

Common carrier or not is the logical puzzle in question. Substitute “Section 222” for Catch-22 to relish the flavor of the ISP regulatory mess.

 

Since the advent of widespread consumer internet service in the 1990s, there has been a regulatory battle over whether ISPs should be considered common carriers, and thus subject to oversight by the FCC under the Telecommunications Act. Since some providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, were also telephone companies, they were already partially subject to FCC oversight. It wasn’t until early 2015 with the FCC’s Open Internet Rules that all ISPs were brought under the same set of regulations as common carriers and bound by the consumer privacy protections of Section 222.

 

Previously the only regulatory oversight of some ISPs on behalf of consumer privacy came from the Federal Trade Commission, and it was limited to holding the companies accountable to the terms of their own privacy policies. The FTC does not regulate consumer privacy regarding the actions of common carriers. It does regulate consumer privacy regarding the actions of so-called edge providers that offer services by voluntary subscription, like Facebook, and of websites in general, but again only by holding them to their own privacy policies, as invasive as they may be. Since the implementation of the FCC’s Open Internet Rules in 2015, all ISPs must adhere to the more restrictive regulations applied to common carriers.

 


The 1970 film adaptation of Joseph Heller’s brilliant Catch-22 lays out a problem in logic. It does not attempt to explicate it, because that would be impossible and probably unhealthy.

 

Still, Chairman Wheeler and others felt that the language of Section 222 did not go far enough in spelling out consumer privacy protection in the internet age. Originally written in 1934 when the capacity of a common carrier to sweep up vast amounts of customer data was not even a pipe dream, and inadequately addressed in the major 1996 revision of the law, Section 222 did not explicitly deny ISPs the ability to sell customer data because the ISPs could interpret “with the approval of the customer” in Section (c)(1) to mean they could consider customers opted-in unless they stated otherwise. Being passive and silent rather than active and vocal has always been considered assent or approval, especially by sneaky people with an agenda, and it is a prevalent practice on the internet. That is a trick of the interactive internet age that no one foresaw in 1934, and apparently not even in 1996. In 2002, Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota introduced a bill which would have changed “the approval of the customer” to “the affirmative written consent of the customer.” The bill went nowhere.

 

Without legislation from Congress to clarify things in the new regulatory environment, Chairman Wheeler felt obliged to take up the slack by adopting Broadband Consumer Privacy Rules in October 2106. As already noted, the vote was 3 to 2. The 3 ayes came from Chairman Wheeler and the two other Democrats on the Commission board. The 2 nays came from the Republicans on the board, including Ajit Pai, now the new Chairman. When the new Republican Congress and President came to Washington, Chairman Pai stayed the new Privacy Rules before they could take effect, and Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona introduced a bill to repeal the Rules and also prevent the FCC from making similar rules in the future.

That’s an android in the center, but it could just as well be you, an internet service customer, caught between government regulators and telecommunications providers.

 

The rest is history. We are returning to the regulatory environment of the past year and a half after the FCC ruled all ISPs were common carriers, but before it adopted new Privacy Rules to clarify the difference between “approval” and “consent” of customers. Now ISPs, though they are common carriers, have a gray area to navigate in Section 222 of the Telecommunications Act, and their claim that they will still be regulated by the FTC is disingenuous at best, considering the FTC does not regulate common carriers. It should be understandable now why ISPs lobbied to repeal the new Privacy Rules. Citing their own privacy policies in which they claim they never have and never will sell customer data, and which had been enforced by the FTC (they glide over the part about FTC regulation no longer applying to them as common carriers), they claimed the FCC was unnecessarily complicating the regulatory environment. They say they shouldn’t be held to stricter privacy standards than companies like Google and Facebook, thereby putting them at a competitive disadvantage. Except for the part about competitive disadvantage not being applicable to monopolistic utilities that are regulated in the public interest, that’s a fair point. Instead of raising the privacy bar for everyone, however, they and their mostly Republican allies in Congress and in the new FCC prefer to lower the bar, serving corporate interests instead of consumers. Trust us, they say. Uh-huh.
― Techly

 

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Getting to Know You

 

Online Privacy and the Founding Fathers
“Online Privacy and the Founding Fathers” by Matt Shirk


The comedian George Carlin used to riff on oxymorons, phrases he found absurd such as “military intelligence” and “business ethics.” To that list we could add “online privacy.” The internet has always been a public place which gives people the illusion of private communication because of how they access it, from a handheld device or from their own computer. Recently in a ruling on a class-action lawsuit concerning Yahoo’s practice of scanning emails, a federal judge affirmed that online privacy is not for everybody.


In the lawsuit brought against Yahoo by email users who did not use Yahoo’s email service but corresponded with people who did, Judge Lucy Koh of the U.S. District Court for Northern California signed off on a settlement which allows Yahoo to continue scanning the emails of non-Yahoo users without their consent. The major change from Yahoo’s previous practice is that it must do so only while the emails are on its servers, rather than while they are in transit.

That satisfies the letter of the law while doing nothing to redress the grievances of non-Yahoo email users. The four plaintiffs in the lawsuit received $5,000 each. The Judge awarded the plaintiffs’ lawyers 4 million dollars in total. A  45 page PDF of the settlement is here, and the summary starts at page 40. Google is being sued in a similar class-action which is pending before Judge Koh.

Since most people don’t fully read the terms and conditions before signing up for online services, it’s doubtful whether many users of Yahoo, Google, or similar free webmail services are aware those companies are scanning their emails for the purpose of targeted advertising, as well as scanning the other half of the exchange coming from their correspondent. Other users who are aware of the scanning are resigned to accepting it as the price of free webmail. And the “price of free” is another oxymoron Mr. Carlin himself might have gleefully noted.

– Techly 

 

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