These browser vendors have produced browser-based PPA (Privacy-Preserving [Ad] Attribution) technologies that attempt to establish a world where “advertising online happens in a way that respects all of us, and where commercial and public interests are in balance”.1 Unfortunately, after studying each proposal, I predict they will inadvertently lend themselves to further incentivize the publication and spread of low-quality information (including misinformation), polluting the information landscape and threatening democracies worldwide.
It seems remarkably optimistic to think that this stuff will shift the supply supply curve of advertising to the right, lower barriers to entry for spammers, and crowd out quality content.
This would require increasing the number of people willing to accept that their web browsers are made by an ad company, that they’ll be subjected to all the ads, and that the software they use is designed in part to measure and analyze the audience of which they’re a part so that data can be sold to advertisers. I don’t think there’s room for that number to increase much further.
More likely, the only substantial result will be Firefox losing ground even more quickly in the battle against a Google monopoly on web browsers and either someone else comes along to take up the fight or we’ll have to give up this “world wide web” thing and go back to writing our comments on bathroom walls, if there are some left that aren’t covered in ads.
There are billions of people using browsers built by an ad company.
It kinda feels like you didn’t read what I wrote, but I didn’t really go into competitive analysis; I assumed that PPA was the new game in town.
It kinda feels like you didn’t read what I wrote. That very assumption is what I was calling optimistic. Unrealistically so, I think.
Perhaps – and maybe I can try exploring that.
Still, the supply curve of content shifting right is already happening. Quality content is already being crowded out. PPA is just part of the monetization story.
True, I was ignoring the distinction between the supply of shitty web pages and the supply of attribution-recording advertising opportunities provided through them. Not quite the same thing even if they do seem likely, as you proposed, to be closely correlated in the scenario where Mozilla’s product somehow ends up surviving to become a hugely influential new ad platform.