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Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

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Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#61

Post by 8ytecoder »

awalton wrote: post #35
rayiner wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Google isn't the destination. Google's top services (search and YouTube) are just means for finding and getting to what we really want, which is the content (website, video, etc.).

> Google isn't the destination. It is the destination, no matter how you try to reframe it. Google's just a destination that collects links to help you to get to other destinations, and pays for its service by showing ads. You can completely shut Google out of your life - block all DNS connections to Google's services, switch to Bing, turn on AdBlock, etc. If your ISP is Verizon or peers with them, and your content e…

Exactly. Google provides a service - indexing the web and helping you find the information you are looking for. That's the product. That's why I go to Google for. In that sense, Google is clearly a destination. The argument that Google and Verizon are somehow similar is disingenuous at best and malicious at worst.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#62

Post by dsacco »

icebraining wrote: post #14
newsat13 wrote: post #4

We all hate ads, no doubt about it. But I don't like the way media is going about accusing Comcast and Verizon for what the consumers brought upon themselves. Comcast/Verizon simply want exactly what Google does. AFAIK, Google does not "prompt" me saying that they mine my data and use it to show ads. In fact, I just tried creating a gmail account and there is no such explicit popup dialog that tell me this informatio…

Google actually does prompt me regularly, telling me that they process my data to show me ads based on it: http://www.darrenmothersele.com/img/blog/google-popup.png

On the search query, "1984." Good sense of humor on Google's part.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#63

Post by 8ytecoder »

pcwalton wrote: post #36
pixl97 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, Youtube is a Google destination. Lots of people make content for the express purpose of distribution on Youtube. Those people could put the content on other services, but they would likely have lower viewership. So, I'd say you're wrong on that. Google is the destination. About search. You don't have to use it. You could go straight to the content producers website if you wanted. Chances are nobody would ever fin…

> Eh, Youtube is a Google destination. Lots of people make content for the express purpose of distribution on Youtube. Those people could put the content on other services, but they would likely have lower viewership. So, I'd say you're wrong on that. Google is the destination. You could equally well look at it this way: Lots of people make content for the "express purpose of distribution" on the Internet . The Inter…

>You don't have to use the Internet. You could walk straight to your favorite brick and mortar store or the movie theater. But you don't want to do that. Verizon wants to be compensated for its service, just as Google does.

And we do. I pay them every month as a matter of fact.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#64

Post by nostrademons »

rayiner wrote: post #55
nostrademons wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They tried this with Google Fiber. Problem is that municipal governments are in Verizon's pocket. To build any infrastructure requires the permission of the local government, who are cozy with entrenched infrastructure providers. So we, as consumers, continue to get fucked, while existing infrastructure providers continue to enjoy a substandard monopoly.

Way more municipal governments gave Google better regulatory treatment than incumbents than did the opposite. Even the Louisville lawsuits are over municipal ordinances that gave Google what it wanted for fiber deployment. Moreover, two large cities (LA and Baltimore) have publicly bad mouthed their incumbents and tried to get Google to build there without success. And of course, your theory would imply Google has le…

Regulations can be easier for Google than any other company building now while still being more difficult than when the incumbent companies put their wires in. Google Fiber didn't expand to California because of CEQA; the practical effect of CEQA is that it lets any property owner along the dig sue to block the project entirely. Note that Google Fiber's beta test was at Stanford, which is in Silicon Valley but happens to be private property.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#65

Post by pdkl95 »

rayiner wrote: post #16
awalton wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe someone can help me understand the distinction between these two. Verizon is the pipe we move data over - it's the road. "Google" is the service at the other end of the pipe - it's our destination. Verizon is unhappy with being the pipe, despite that literally being the business they signed up to be in. They have decided that the destinations make more money than they can ever squeeze out of being the road se…

But Google isn't the destination. Google's top services (search and YouTube) are just means for finding and getting to what we really want, which is the content (website, video, etc.).

> Google isn't the destination.

Google is many destinations. The ISP isn't a destination, aka a host[1]

> Google's top services

...are a different problem at the application layer[2]. Yes, surveillance capitalism business models at Google et al is a serious problem that needs to be addressed. It's still a separate problem from ISP-level surveillance. It is unlikely that the same solution can be applied to both problems.

An ISP - aka a business that routes packets in the internetworking layer[3], is a very different market than the network endpoints ("destination", aka "host"). I can (and do) drop outgoing packets to many destinations.

> the content (website, video, etc.)

You're conflating internet hosts with services provided by those hosts.

[1] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122#page-6

[2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122#page-9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_layer

[3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1122#page-10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_layer

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#66

Post by rayiner »

nostrademons wrote: post #64
rayiner wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Way more municipal governments gave Google better regulatory treatment than incumbents than did the opposite. Even the Louisville lawsuits are over municipal ordinances that gave Google what it wanted for fiber deployment. Moreover, two large cities (LA and Baltimore) have publicly bad mouthed their incumbents and tried to get Google to build there without success. And of course, your theory would imply Google has le…

Regulations can be easier for Google than any other company building now while still being more difficult than when the incumbent companies put their wires in . Google Fiber didn't expand to California because of CEQA; the practical effect of CEQA is that it lets any property owner along the dig sue to block the project entirely. Note that Google Fiber's beta test was at Stanford, which is in Silicon Valley but happe…

CEQA is quite a bit different than saying the "municipal governments are in Verizon's pocket." Also, CEQA was enacted in 1970. All modern broadband networks were built under the auspices of laws like that.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#67

Post by jacques_chester »

rayiner wrote: post #54
jacques_chester wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The differences are: 1. If Google tracks me, they have maybe 50-70% coverage of my whereabouts. My ISP gets 100%. 2. I mistrust Telcos more than Google, based on historical example. Google hasn't quite remained true to "Don't Be Evil" (dollars are corrosive, billions of dollars doubly so), but at least they sorta try .

Is there a rational reason to distrust telcos more than Google? Verizon did supercookies once. Google evolved from a simple "show an ad for delivering a search result" to tracking you all over the Internet, embedding tracking in other websites, tracking you through the dominant browser and mobile platform, etc. One company in this story has the history of pushing the boundaries on pervasive invasion of privacy, and i…

> Is there a rational reason to distrust telcos more than Google?

I grew up under Telecom, later called Telstra.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#68

Post by jacques_chester »

nostrademons wrote: post #57
jacques_chester wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer, but wouldn't that local authority be delegated by statute from state governments? Google Fiber was a fluffy bunny sort of thing. Verizon trying to drain the river of gold before it reaches Google is existential-threat stuff. In their position I would go to the mattresses.

Yeah, AFAIU the local authority is delegated by state governments. Voters could fix this if they got organized and cared about it enough, but it's pretty hard to get voters organized about anything these days, and of all the political issues out there, "gigabit fiber" tends to rank below "save democracy", "get cops to stop killing black people", "preserve women's healthcare", "stop global warming", "don't go to war",…

> They just didn't figure on a bureaucratic quagmire.

They also apparently didn't figure on the slow and expensive business of lobbying. If the matter is unimportant to voters, that makes it available to what I will charitably call "the most civic-minded and purposefully engaged company".

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#69

Post by johncolanduoni »

newsat13 wrote: post #25
awalton wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe someone can help me understand the distinction between these two. Verizon is the pipe we move data over - it's the road. "Google" is the service at the other end of the pipe - it's our destination. Verizon is unhappy with being the pipe, despite that literally being the business they signed up to be in. They have decided that the destinations make more money than they can ever squeeze out of being the road se…

Google also started as a search engine to help me find my way to my real destination. Instead it has snuck in and started tracking where I am going, what I am doing there, why I am there and what not. If Google is allowed to change business models radically (and very profitably), why not Verizon. To be clear, I am just pointing out that singling out Verizon/Comcast does not get to the root of the problem. We need bla…

Stopping using Google is pretty feasible for most people. There are other free search engines, other free email providers, other smartphone operating systems (also distributions of their own with tracking removed), and Google's third party tracking is trivial to block in their own browser. You could argue that other options for these services are of worse quality, but pushing people to use your services because they are better quality even though there are other options is exactly what we want businesses to be doing.

If you have even two choices of ISPs, you are very lucky. For a lot of people it's Verizon or the highway, and for those lucky few with choice it's usually something like Comcast or Verizon, which now that I think about it doesn't sound so lucky after all.

I understand arguing that neither of these companies should get to pull this shit. I don't get how you could claim that there isn't a material difference in the level (and type) of coercion being applied.

Re: Verizon wants a piece of Google's ad business

#70

Post by nikcub »

rayiner wrote: post #41

Framing this as "who gets this pot of advertising money?" is the honest way to frame it. Privacy is just a proxy war between companies seeking advertising revenues. But who gets the advertising revenue isn't the relevant policy concern. The government shouldn't care whether Google gets that revenue or someone else. The relevant policy concerns are what level of privacy protections do people want, and what practical c…

I can and do opt out of Google - I disable third-party cookies and run an ad blocker.

That first step alone is enough to make a lot of ad targeting irrelevant.

What a lot of people might not realize is that with the shift to mobile browsing and Apple disabling third-party cookies by default a lot of the data on ad networks and brokers has gone completely dark. It's a real crisis in the industry, and ironically one of the things that is driving new moves such as combining ISP data for tracking.

The problem with the ISP tracking, and the reason why I think it is one of the greatest privacy threats consumers have ever faced - is that there is no easy tech solution. There is no 'disable ISP tracking' option in your browser in the same way there is for cookies.

Cookies are well regulated. Any attempt to bypass user controls results in FCC action. There is no equivalent to this with ISP data (any longer).

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