zlacker

>>dagurp+(OP)

    > Can we just refuse to implement it?
    > Unfortunately, it’s not that simple this time. Any browser choosing not to implement this would not be trusted and any website choosing to use this API could therefore reject users from those browsers. Google also has ways to drive adoptions by websites themselves.

This is true of any contentious browser feature. Choosing not to implement it means your users will sometimes be presented with a worse UX if a website's developers decide to require that feature.

But as a software creator, it's up to you to determine what is best for your customers. If your only hope of not going along with this is having the EU come in and slapping Google's wrist, I'm concerned that you aren't willing to take a hard stance on your own.

>>wbobei+Hz1
>But as a software creator, it's up to you to determine what is best for your customers.

Absolutely zero large web properties do anything based on what's best for users. If this gains traction, Google will simply deny adsense payments for impressions from an "untrusted" page, and thus all the large players that show ads for revenue will immediately implement WEI without giving a single flying shit about the users, as they always have and always will.

>>nvy+7F1
I think this is a little reductive. WEI is likely what some people at Google felt was best for AdSense's customers, i.e. advertisers. It just so happens that Google has a whole other set of customers who this is not best for, e.g. Chrome users, YouTube users. The problem is that it's all coming from one company, and AdSense is where the money is at, so I don't trust Google to make the best decisions for their secondary customers.

I definitely agree that AdSense blocking clients that don't implement WEI seems likely. At that point, it will be up to websites that rely on AdSense revenue to decide what to do with customers they aren't monetizing. That's already a question they have from users with ad blockers, although that is a little bit more challenging to detect.

My hope is that the majority of sites accept that they can't rely on ad revenue, and instead resort to directly monetizing users as a way to make ends meet. IMO that's a better relationship than indirectly selling their data and attention.

>>wbobei+SZ1
>My hope is that the majority of sites accept that they can't rely on ad revenue, and instead resort to directly monetizing users as a way to make ends meet.

How?

You see, this is the problem I have with all these debates where advertising is declared the villain. "Directly monetising" usually means subscriptions and logins, which means you lose all anonymity, not just gradually like under an ad targeting regime, but definitively and completely. Now payment processors and banks also get a share of the surveillance cake.

The greatest irony is that you may not even get rid of advertising. Advertising only becomes more valuable and more effective. All the newspaper subscriptions I have run ads.

The second issue is that advertising is paid for by consumers in proportion to their spending power, because a certain share of every £$€ spent is used to buy ads. Therefore, rich people fund more of our free at the point of use online services than poor people do.

If rich people move to subscriptions, this subsidy ends. Poor people will either be cut off from high quality services and relegated to their own low quality information and services (as is already the case with newspapers) or they will have to suffer through even more advertising.

>>fauige+zd2
Fair criticism that I used "ad revenue" as a generality, I was more specifically thinking of AdSense ads and the like. I think there are plenty of forms of advertising that are better for the relationship and less exploitative of users, such as corporate sponsorship or sponsored content ("featured" search results, brand collaborations etc.) As long as the relationship is clear when something is paid vs organic.

> Now payment processors and banks also get a share of the surveillance cake.

I agree this is a problem. I work on Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, so that's my preferred solution to the problem, but there are other approaches to addressing the poor state of privacy and payments too. I don't think that that being a problem means that the relationship we have with advertising isn't as bad though.

> If rich people move to subscriptions, this subsidy ends.

There are plenty of examples where this is not the case. The freemium model exists in places where injected advertisements are not the norm, such as free to play games. Fortnite whales subsidize millions of low income players to get a high quality game for free. Whether or not you think the relationship between Epic and its players is another question, but it's a model that can continue to exist without advertisement. Especially when free users are necessary to provide content for paying users, like posts on Twitter or Reddit, or players in a game.