Comment by Ghexor
2 years ago
How convenient for the data collecting companies that so generously sponsor the new & free services, that our democratically controlled communication infrastructure looses in value.
2 years ago
How convenient for the data collecting companies that so generously sponsor the new & free services, that our democratically controlled communication infrastructure looses in value.
Advertising is a cancer on modern society. It will metastasize to any new communications medium, public or private, and destroy it from within. People will switch to new medium that offer less spam, but advertisers quickly follow to strip-mine the new channel. A cycle of life, so to speak.
It’s also so annoying circular. We spend money to get more clients but this stops being effective at a certain point so now you’re just spending money to advertise for the sake of it or the status, and could even be losing money by doing so.
In my experience, the fear of missing out is a big driver for companies to continue to throw good money after bad in marketing. Maybe Facebook ads aren't driving as much traffic to your company as it used to, but if you give it up and all your competitors still use it it's pretty understandable to worry about falling behind the market.
I don’t have a problem with advertising generally, as long as I know upfront that’s what funds a tool I’m using, and isn’t disguised like a non-ad (eg. Unlike what Google does, which is outright deception). Advertising and spam are two separate things in my book.
However, my real problem is with what I call “The Google Strategy.” Basically, they take publicly funded infrastructure like HTTP and SMTP, capture the network by dumping “free” products on the market (with basically no advertising), kill off competitors, then monetize their market capture by removing the "free" part, packing these products with ads, making them worse and worse over time in the process. And everyone is trapped, since they captured the network of this public infrastructure. This is the story of Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, etc.
It’s anti-competitive, anti-markets, and quite frankly should have been regulated away as a strategy a long time ago.
Google basically ran Microsoft's classic anti-competitive B2B strategy to capture the consumer internet, and got away with it!
This process has a descriptive name, enshittification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification), and it seems to apply to most internet services.
1 reply →
> I don’t have a problem with advertising generally
You should, honestly.
Agreed. Advertising is psychological manipulation. I would be happy if all forms of it were just outlawed.
Is our communication infrastructure democratically controlled? At least in the US, we may have federal regulators but isn't the infrastructure still owned by a few massive telecoms corporations?
"Our democratically controlled communication infrastructure" honestly deserves to be deprecated and replaced with some kind of federated voice system that comes out of the IETF instead of the telcos. What kind of antediluvian nonsense doesn't use end-to-end encryption in 2024?
AT&T has a long history with three letter agencies. If they ever did implement e2e encryption it would certainly come with backdoors that make it e2e only by name.
All the more reason to have the IETF do it and leave AT&T out of it.
Any modern system is going to use IP as a transport. Even the traditional phone network is VoIP under the hood in modern networks. The replacement system should be kept as far from the influence of the last mile providers as possible.
The thing that definitely shouldn't happen is that you get your phone number from them. Let it be "user@host" like email or otherwise assigned via DNS.