To Save the News, We Must Shatter Ad-Tech | Electronic Frontier Foundation

The "original sin" of the Internet is that it was built nearly exclusively on advertising revenue. In addition to creating a set of incentives that do not benefit people, it created an incredibly complex ad-tech stack where Google, Meta, and one or two other companies own the entire market. This gives a good example:

That means that there are millions of transactions every single day in which Google (representing a publisher) tells Google (representing the marketplace) about an ad-slot for sale; whereupon Google (representing many different advertisers) places bids on that ad-slot. Once the sale is consummated, Google earns three different fees: one for serving as the seller's agent, another for serving as the buyer's agent, and a third for the use of its marketplace.

This creates many problems.

The ad-tech market isn't a market at all: it’s a big store con where everyone the publisher sees is in on the game: the buyer's agent, the seller's agent and the marketplace where they bring the publisher's product are all run by a single company, or by two companies that have secretly agreed not to compete. If you can’t spot the sucker at the poker-table…you're the sucker.

That's how ad-tech grew to consume more than half of all the ad dollars spent. They stole it.

This needs to be fixed. The actually illegal stuff - market rigging - is the kind of thing that antitrust enforcers frequently look after. They're on it.

This approach to break these functions into different organizations could be a benefit, but I’m highly skeptical we'll see it happen. These are the most valuable companies that have ever existed.

Instead of reforming advertising, I think that "original sin" needs to be shed entirely. Even if the various parts of this stack were not self-dealing, it still creates bad incentives to drive page views over everything else and ever more sensational content. Micropayments solutions like Bitcoin Lightning that are immediate, free, and censorship resistant could be huge for news organizations. Not only ridding themselves of the page view incentive, but also making them resilient to their funding being disintermediated.