Episode 158 - Google is building a privacy friendly ad network?

I don't think this can be made to work with legal prowess. Blockchain cryptocurrency had one good promise about it and that was the ability to have microtransactions come off of your wallet to pay for the amount of content you consume. Cryptocurrencies failed miserably at that, partly because no one cares about implementation. Everyone has been in it just for a quick buck. But also because there is no scalable solution in blockchain that can make this work. The way this could work in the most simplistic terms would be a web browser wallet with an open API that other developers could access if they wanted to. So that if you went to the nytimes.com, you would get one article for free, then for the next one, it would request a charge off of your browser wallet. The wallet would be topped by the user who would also control which publisher gets to charge them for their consumption. Publishers should also be free to revoke access to non-paying users. I don't think this would break the law anymore than piracy breaks the copyright law for those that access paid content for free without author permission.

The Hated One

It's tough. At the end of the day, people need eat and if consumers aren't willing to pay for what they take, somehow will have to figure out a monetization strategy. Google really perverted the whole economy by offering so many services for free just so that they can get that market domination.

The Hated One

Yes, FLOC has been discontinued by Google also.

The Hated One

I like your idea about direct payments as alternative to advertising in theory, but if (for example) Google were to announce that tomorrow, I'd be extremely concerned. First, the implementation would need to preserve privacy both between user and ad-manager, as well as ad-manager and website. I'm sure this could be done, but I don't see it as likely. Second, this might turn out to be a horrific development legally. What this could essentially do is transform browsing (etc) into a quasi-paid service. This would undoubdedly be used by many companies to argue, possibly successfully so, that anyone who doesn't pay and then tries to prevent or block ads/tracking is breaking a contract. In other words: Adblockers or even anti-tracking-tech might become illegal in many jurisdictions. This wouldn't be the end ofc, but it would surely be a huge blow to privacy & anonymity. And even if adblocker usage wouldn't be outright punished by law, this would still provide the perfect pretext to ban all such software from the App Store, Google Play, Chrome Webstore and so on.

Interesting episode, I liked your idea at the end - a kind of pay as you go contribution per the content consumed. For me, it beats the hell out of subscription or advertising models. It is good to see big technology companies like google providing some privacy features to meet demand, it indicates that more people are starting to tune in and care about these issues.

Harr

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea

Harr