Comcast-Funded Civil Rights Groups Claim Low-Income People Want Ads Over Privacy

https://theintercept.com/2017/03/29/isp-civil-rights/

by shopkins • 9 years ago

167 70 9 years ago

theintercept.com

jasonkostempski• 9 years ago

How about ads with privacy? They are not mutually exclusive.

Chaebixi3• 9 years ago

How about ads with privacy? They are not mutually exclusive.

Yeah, but internet advertising fetishizes "personalization" and quantitative metrics, which are predicated on invasions of privacy. Advertisers could put those toys down, and go back to more traditional, privacy-preserving advertising, but I don't think they have the maturity and willpower to do so on their own.

ouid• 9 years ago

you're asserting that the reason why advertising organizations who are competing to deliver the most valuable advertising product to their clients end up invading people's privacy is a lack of maturity and willpower? You're insane if you believe that this problem is not systemic.

sp3322• 9 years ago

How would they know what kind of ad to show if they don't know anything about you?

mattnewton• 9 years ago

The same way it used to work: you show the same ads to almost everyone based on the content, not the people. Not that I think advertisers will go for it.

hackuser4• 9 years ago

How about ads with privacy? They are not mutually exclusive.

Mozilla attempted this on the Firefox home page. Nobody understood the point (partly Mozilla's fault for poor messaging) and it was roundly criticized for putting advertising in the browser, instead of providing a solution to funding websites without violating privacy.

omginternets3• 9 years ago

Targeted ads already convert miserably, so they (unfortunately) sort of are mutually exclusive...

sfifs2• 9 years ago

That's called TV. Cost per reach point on TV is a lot lower than the internet which charges advertisers extra for "targeting"

Can be done... rates would have to go down below TV to work and even so will be attractive only for big advertizers (think billions in sales).. Smaller advertisers would have no interest in the medium without targeting

rfrank• 9 years ago

Reminds me of Facebook's arguments in support of Free Basics.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-35197062

meesterdude• 9 years ago

wow, give me something i very much don't want while taking away something i very much want. Sounds more like corporate rights than civil rights.

Overtonwindow• 9 years ago

Is there nothing Comcast won't do to screw the public?

inputcoffee• 9 years ago

On the plus side, the low-income group can probably get the privacy issue addressed through great customer service.

kalleboo• 9 years ago

They'd probably also agree to slavery to get food and shelter

LeifCarrotson• 9 years ago

I can't imagine what they would be willing to do for a luxury like health care!

greedyliberal• 9 years ago

This idea makes sense, empirically. There is a cost to provide internet, and low-income individuals may be more willing to provide a combination of valuable assets (cash & data), while higher income individuals would be willing to provide more cash in exchange for no data.

Regardless, the end payment is the same, it's just a question about how you want to pay.

Edit: For those who think this may be a money grab, remember that the government is getting tax revenue out of the profits ISPs make from monetizing your data. While the ethics of this are debatable, the alternative is zero additional government revenue. So the ethics of privacy need to be weighed against the ethics of providing programs for communities that could be beneficial.

ehsankia• 9 years ago

If they provide a decent free connection (at least 10/2), and support it buy collecting your data, then fine. But to force it on people who pay for a connection makes zero sense.

thatcat• 9 years ago

Isps already have an obligation to run lines to low income areas and are required to offer lowered income / lower speed tiers. This just subsidises it so that they make more money from another source.

mfringel2• 9 years ago

But that's not how services are priced... you can't guarantee that how/what a private entity will cross-subsidize. The whole point of a Universal Service Fund (for telephony) is that there was no motivation for this kind of monetization.

As for the gov't getting tax revenue from selling the information, that's just unpersuasive. First, it's an incredibly indirect way of getting the revenue, and second that could be used to justify any profit-making activity, which makes it meaningless.

bighi• 9 years ago

It makes sense. Poor people can't pay for privacy, now that it became a feature instead of a right.

eveningcoffee3• 9 years ago

First there is strong bias here, so we actually do not know really if it is true.

Second, lets imagine that poor people would prefer whipping instead of imprisonment (they can return to work sooner) or fine.

Should we follow the same logic here then and accept it?

mfringel2• 9 years ago

In your example, "whipping", "imprisonment", and "[or] fine" are all examples of punishments for a crime.

Being poor is not a crime.

cmurf• 9 years ago

I think it's asinine "free market" religious nonsense. If we had done this ~100 years ago with phones being rolled out to rural areas, the free market would have said pay $1000 a month for phone service. Instead the government forced everyone to pay a subsidy so it'd be cheaper in rural areas, and even cheaper for poor people anywhere including cities.

No one complained about this.

So now the idea is privacy is a commodity to be purchased, and freedom from ads is a commodity to be purchased. It's every man for himself, that leads to more distrust, less cooperation, and more acrimony and I think it's incompatible with a civil society. This classist variety of Republican/conservative/capitalist - whatever label to put on it - is vile. It's neo-aristocracy, and it's anti-democratic.

cmdrfred2• 9 years ago

If this business model is not OK for Comcast why is it OK for Google and the rest of the internet?

hatsunearu• 9 years ago

Ads over privacy?

Why can't we have Ads vs. Privacy? Income for Comcast can come from either at the cost of serving ads OR at the cost of privacy--not both. What the fuck?

prklmn• 9 years ago

Them wanting people to believe that this will lower the cost of internet service is laughable. Have TV ads lowered the cost of cable?

We need to think of the internet as a public utility. How absurd would it be if every time you used water in your home, you heard an advertisement playing from a speaker in the faucet.

hackuser4• 9 years ago

Them wanting people to believe that this will lower the cost of internet service is laughable. Have TV ads lowered the cost of cable?

It's a very important point; this false argument is often used. In truth, in the marketplace, goods are not priced at 'cost-plus'; i.e., they aren't priced by taking the cost to the vendor and adding a profit margin.

Goods are priced at the point that will maximize profit for the vendor; economists would say at the point that maximizes marginal profit. Colloquially, they charge as much as they can.

The fact that the vendor has another stream of income from Product B doesn't cause them to reduce their prices for Product A. Microsoft doesn't cut the price of Windows because they are making so much from Office.

aero1422• 9 years ago

This is only half the argument, though. Yes, companies charge as much as possible, but prices go down when a competitor can offer a comparable good at a lower price. Some markets clearly have features that make competition harder.

astrodust3• 9 years ago

Microsoft doesn't cut the price of Windows because they are making so much from Office.

Microsoft did cut the price of Windows to get people to adopt it early on because they would be making so much money from Office.

Microsoft Word vs. WordPerfect, Excel vs. Quattro Pro and Lotus 1-2-3. These battles were won because of Windows and that cemented their position as industry leader.

Now that Microsoft is in a dominant position they don't cut the price of Windows as much, but to remain on top they do give the OEMs a very sweet per-unit deal they really can't refuse.

daveFNbuck• 9 years ago

The profit-maximizing price drops as the profit margin goes up. As service providers make more money by selling customer data, they'll be able to increase profits by lowering prices and bringing in more customer data. Of course, this assumes a significant amount of customers who have the option to switch providers or choose not to have internet access.

mundo• 9 years ago

Every time I hear someone argue for the efficiencies of privatization, I think of my water utility emulating mobile carriers and billing me for "Anytime gallons" and "Nighttime gallons" and "Weekend gallons".

twoodfin• 9 years ago

Instead, if you're in a drought-prone area, you get water bans.

dpc_pw• 9 years ago

This is quite popular in Poland for electricity. It makes a lot of economic sense.

Same with Internet. Back in the days I had a plan like that, where Internet would be faster and wouldn't count towards your quota if used in the night. All the heavy downloads would be scheduled to run overnight

najati83• 9 years ago

This happens in Europe, at least with electricity, you can choose a tariff that is cheaper during the night and more expensive during daytime.

yuhong• 9 years ago

ISPs don't have to pay the content providers that cable does though.

cwyers2• 9 years ago

Have TV ads lowered the cost of cable?

Almost certainly.

curiousgeorgio• 9 years ago

So true. It's easy to forget this point. Do the math:

Take all the content available to a cable subscriber, and the money that goes into producing that content. Take out the ads and split the bill (in addition to the relatively low costs of operating/maintaining the cable company itself) among the subscribers. That's just covering costs; now add a bit of profit to motivate those companies to stay in business.

There's no question you'd be paying more - a lot more. We just don't think the ads are saving us money because we don't know any different - that's just the way TV has been since the beginning.

mikeash• 9 years ago

Even if it did lower the price of the service, those advertisements aren't going to be purchased unless there's profit in it, and there isn't going to be profit in it unless they convince the people exposed to it to spend money on stupid crap.

Those poor people will pay one way or another. Given the indirectness and inefficiency involved in the advertising approach, I wager they'll pay more that way. And it'll be less fair: people with less willpower will pay more.

Advertising makes sense when direct payment is impractical. Broadcast TV is the classic example. It's really hard to charge money for it, so ads let you indirectly collect money from your viewers. On the internet, paywalls are practical technologically, but tend to add too much friction, so we get ads instead. But there's no reason for it here.

sfifs2• 9 years ago

The TV Industry by and large cannot survive without funding by advertisers. Check the P&L of any channel. Without ads, you'd be paying a lot more - or in other words, the content wouldn't exist because of lack of market

em3rgent0rdr• 9 years ago

haven't internet ads lowered the cost of pretty much everything on the internet?

equalunique• 9 years ago

I have no problem with ads being targeted to me. It increases the likelihood something useful will pop up on my screen. I also don't mind using sites which are ad free, nor do I mind paying for ad-free services like YouTube Red.

tomjen3• 9 years ago

Oh my God, that is low.

And quite frankly, for a of people, they're probably right. Especially because people don't understand what they are giving up, because it somehow has to do with "computers" and are therefore different from real life.

If, however you were to explain to a person, that this would be the same as his landlord knowing every single step he took in his home, when he took that step, what he was listening to when he took the step, who he was taking the step with, exactly how he looked when he took the step and use it to shoe advertising, he would cry foul and he would understand that this was not a small thing.

shmerl• 9 years ago

They mean Comcast funded corporate control group? Calling it "civil rights" is an insult. This paid propaganda is just sickening.

cat199• 9 years ago

Low income people also would prefer spam and coolaid every single meal instead of starving - that doesn't mean it should be promoted as a good diet...

cr0sh• 9 years ago

I'm wondering how this is all going to play out with ad-blocking software and plugins...?

Are we going to see where - if you run such software - suddenly you can't browse any sites, or you can only browse very slowly?

Or will running ad-blocking software be considered illegal or something - because you're depriving potential profit from somebody?

Will ads slowly take over the entire experience? To the point where you just don't want to use the internet any longer (or at least the web)?

Will people move back to gopher and ftp (oh, we can only hope)? BBSs? Door games and MUDs to the rescue?

My wife and I have considered moving to a more rural area of our state - we're both tired of the city and of people in general. I've lamented about how out in such areas, internet service would be spotty or non-existent, but you know what?

Maybe that's a good thing, ultimately. If I need internet for some reason, I'll just mosey into town, send an email or two, then mosey back home.

These advertisers, their enablers, ISPs, and the corrupt political machine that supports it all? They can go f--- themselves.

Comcast-Funded Civil Rights Groups Claim Low-Income People Want Ads Over Privacy

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