Thread · 12 tweets · 31 Dec 2019

I disagree with Kenneth but it's a good topic! To get it out of the way: search engines have incentives only partially aligned with an open Web. They need content to feed on, but it's better for them if the content is in their space and constrained rather than open.

That's very clear with Google Search which is increasingly a walled garden dominated by links to other Google properties and the wasteland of creativity that AMP is. The primary cure here is antitrust. Nothing new or surprising there.

More importantly: there is no such thing as THE business model of the Web. At this point in time monetisation on the Web is dominated not just by advertising, but by a very specific implementation of it. This is contingent and likely temporary.

There are several issues to solve. First, web engineers tend to be woefully ignorant of how ads work today. This leads to the persistence of bad practices in the ad stack and a dearth of innovation. There are cool problems in there and a lot could change!

Second, the ad world has become stuck at a local optimum/pessimum. Either you have Google/Facebook/Amazon, or you have smaller companies trying to compete on G/FB/AMZN's terms, which is to say on how much surveillance they can extract.

Needless to say: it's a game the small ones are losing, but because it's a local maximum any incremental change makes them lose faster. The market is ripe for a jump, and this could be driven by browsers or players aligned with an open Web. One contender is @brave.

There are barriers to shifting the ad market. It's a market for lemons (incredibly opaque) and the bad has displaced the good. Bringing about change means proving good outcomes and being able to scale. There is also no interoperability in some key places. And the duopoly.

But things are bad enough that there's a window for change. Starting from governance - which is almost entirely absent in digital advertising - is a good lead. As is looking for a model that does not destroy smaller news outlets like the current one is doing.

Third, when monopoly is strong standards are weak (either absent or overtaken by regulatory capture). It is very useful to have standard orgs in marching order, but this won't be solved by a foundation, at least not done traditionally.

Traditional models need power, which they get from: 1. arbitrating between sufficiently matched competitors; 2. being captured by a dominant player (usually under the guise of beneficence); 3. State support. 1 is dead, 2 doesn't help, 3 is all kinds of impossible right now.

It might not be the dumbest idea to rebuild independence and openness back into the Web by starting from ad innovations with strong governance. I don't have answers, if you have ideas I am definitely interested.

At any rate, we can't rely on search engines to have the right incentives, that only works with competition and a better ad ecosystem. If we want the open Web to live we have to design the governance for it. Thank you for coming to my TED talk! 🐻