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Do We Want A Society Built On The Architecture of Dumb Terminals?

jbat — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 23:59:30 +0000

God, "innovation." First banalized by undereducated entrepreneurs in the oughts, then ground to pablum by corporate grammarians over the past decade, "innovation" - at least when applied to business - deserves an unheralded etymological death. But. This will be a post about innovation. However, whenever I feel the need to peck that insipid word into my keyboard, I'm going to use some variant of the verb "to flourish" instead. Blame Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps for this: I recently read his Mass Flourishing, which outlines the decline of western capitalism, and I find its titular terminology far less annoying. So flourishing it will be. In his 2013 work, Phelps (who received the 2006 Nobel in economics) credits mass participation in a process of innovation (sorry, there's that word again) as central to mass flourishing, and further argues – with plenty of economic statistics to back him up – that it's been more than a full generation since we've seen mass flourishing in any society. He writes: ...prosperity on a national scale—mass flourishing—comes from broad involvement of people in the processes of innovation: the conception, development, and spread of new methods and products—indigenous innovation down to the grassroots. This dynamism may be narrowed or weakened by institutions arising from imperfect understanding or competing objectives. But institutions alone cannot create it. Broad dynamism must be fueled by the right values and not too diluted by other values. Phelps argues the last "mass flourishing" economy was the 1960s in the United States (with a brief but doomed resurgence during the first years of the open web...but that promise went unfulfilled). And he warns that "nations unaware of how their prosperity is generated may take steps that cost them much of their dynamism." Phelps further warns of a new kind of corporatism, a “techno nationalism” that blends state actors with corporate interests eager to collude with the state to cement market advantage (think Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich). These warnings were proffered largely before our current debate about the role of the tech giants now so dominant in our society. But it sets an interesting context and raises important questions. What happens, for instance, when large corporations capture the regulatory framework of a nation and lock in their current market dominance (and, in the case of Big Tech, their policies around data use?). I began this post with Phelps to make a point: The rise of massive data monopolies in nearly every aspect of our society is not only choking off shared prosperity, it's also blinkered our shared vision for the kind of future we could possibly inhabit, if only we architect our society to enable it. But to imagine a different kind of future, we first have to examine the present we inhabit. The Social Architecture of Data I use the term "architecture" intentionally, it's been front of mind for several reasons. Perhaps the most difficult thing for any society to do is to share a vision of the future, one that a majority might agree upon. Envisioning the future of a complex living system - a city, a corporation, a nation - is challenging work, work we usually outsource to trusted institutions like government, religions, or McKinsey (half joking...). But in the past few decades, something has changed when it comes to society's future vision. Digital technology became synonymous with "the future," and along the way, we outsourced that future to the most successful corporations creating digital technology. Everything of value in our society is being transformed into data, and extraordinary corporations have risen which refine that data into insight, knowledge, and ultimately economic power. Driven as they are by this core commodity of data, these companies have acted to cement their control over it. This is not unusual economic behavior, in fact, it's quite predictable. So predictable, in fact, that it's developed its own structure - an architecture, if you will, of how data is managed in today's information society. I've a hypothesis about this architecture - unproven at this point (as all are) - but one I strongly suspect is accurate. Here's how it might look on a whiteboard: We "users" deliver raw data to a service provider, like Facebook or Google, which then captures, refines, processes, and delivers that data back as services to us. The social contract we make is captured in these services' Terms of Services - we may "own" the data, but for all intents and purposes, the power over that information rests with the platform. The user doesn't have a lot of creative license to do much with that data he or she "owns" - it lives on the platform, and the platform controls what can be done with it. Now, if this sounds familiar, you're likely a student of early computing architectures. Back before the PC revolution, most data, refined or not, lived on a centralized platform known as a mainframe. Nearly all data storage and compute processing occurred on the mainframe. Applications and services were broadcast from the mainframe back to "dumb terminals," in front of which early knowledge workers toiled. Here's a graph of that early mainframe architecture: This mainframe architecture had many drawbacks - a central point of failure chief among them, but perhaps its most damning characteristic was its hierarchical, top down architecture. From an user's point of view, all the power resided at the center. This was great if you ran IT at a large corporation, but suffice to say the mainframe architecture didn't encourage creativity or a flourishing culture. The mainframe architecture was supplanted over time with a "client server" architecture, where processing power migrated from the center to the edge, or node. This was due in large part to the rise the networked personal computer (servers were used for storing services or databases of information too large to fit on PCs). Because they put processing power and data storage into the hands of the user, PCs became synonymous with a massive increase in productivity and creativity (Steve Jobs called them "bicycles for the mind.") With the PC revolution power transferred from the "platform" to the user - a major architectural shift. The rise of networked personal computers became the seedbed for the world wide web, which had its own revolutionary architecture. I won't trace it here (many good books exist on the topic), but suffice to say the core principle of the early web's architecture was its distributed nature. Data was packetized and distributed independent of where (or how) it might be processed. As more and more "web servers" came online, each capable of processing data as well as distributing it, the web became a tangled, hot mess of interoperable computing resources. What mattered wasn't the pipes or the journey of the data, but the service created or experienced by the user at the point of that service delivery, which in the early days was of course a browser window (later on, those points of delivery became smartphone apps and more). If you were to attempt to map the social architecture of data in the early web, your map would look a lot like the night sky - hundreds of millions of dots scattered in various constellations across the sky, each representing a node where data might be shared, processed, and distributed. In those early days the ethos of the web was that data should be widely shared between consenting parties so it might be "mixed and mashed" so as to create new products and services. There was no "mainframe in the sky" anymore - it seemed everyone on the web had equal and open opportunities to create and exchange value. This is why the late 1990s through mid oughts were a heady time in the web world - nearly any idea could be tried out, and as the web evolved into a more robust set of standards, one could be forgiven for presuming that the open, distributed nature of the web would inform its essential social architecture. But as web-based companies began to understand the true value of controlling vast amounts of data, that dream began to fade. As we grew addicted to some of the most revelatory web services - first Google search, then Amazon commerce, then Facebook's social dopamine - those companies began to centralize their data and processing policies, to the point where we are now: Fearing these giants' power over us, even as we love their products and services. An Argument for Mass Flourishing So where does that leave us if we wish to heed the concerns of Professor Phelps? Well, let's not forget his admonition: "nations unaware of how their prosperity is generated may take steps that cost them much of their dynamism." My hypothesis is simply this: Adopting a mainframe architecture for our most important data - our intentions (Google), our purchases (Amazon), our communications and social relationships (Facebook) - is not only insane, it's also massively deprecative of future innovation (damn, sorry, but sometimes the word fits). In Facebook, Tear Down This Wall, I argued: ... it’s impossible for one company to fabricate reality for billions of individuals independent of the interconnected experiences and relationships that exist outside of that fabricated reality. It’s an utterly brittle product model, and it’s doomed to fail. Banning third party agents from engaging with Facebook’s platform insures that the only information that will inform Facebook will be derived from and/or controlled by Facebook itself. That kind of ecosystem will ultimately collapse on itself. No single entity can manage such complexity. It presumes a God complex. So what might be a better architecture? I hinted at it in the same post: Facebook should commit itself to being an open and neutral platform for the exchange of value across not only its own services, but every service in the world. In other words, free the data, and let the user decide what do to with it. I know how utterly ridiculous this sounds, in particular to anyone reading from Facebook proper, but I am convinced that this is the only architecture for data that will allow a massively flourishing society. Now this concept has its own terminology: Data portability. And this very concept is enshrined in the EU's GDPR legislation, which took effect one week ago. However, there's data portability, and then there's flourishing data portability - and the difference between the two really matters. The GDPR applies only to data that a user *gives* to a service, not data *co-created* with that service. You also can't gather any insights the service may have inferred about you based on the data you either gave or co-created with it. Not to mention, none of that data is exported in a machine readable fashion, essentially limiting its utility. But imagine if that weren't the case. Imagine instead you can download your own Facebook or Amazon "token," a magic data coin containing not only all the useful data and insights about you, but a control panel that allows you to set and revoke permissions around that data for any context. You might pass your Amazon token to Walmart, set its permissions to "view purchase history" and ask Walmart to determine how much money it might have saved you had you purchased those items on Walmart's service instead of Amazon. You might pass your Facebook token to Google, set the permissions to compare your social graph with others across Google's network, and then ask Google to show you search results based on your social relationships. You might pass your Google token to a startup that already has your genome and your health history, and ask it to munge the two in case your 20-year history of searching might infer some insights into your health outcomes. This might seem like a parlor game, but this is the kind of parlor game that could unleash an explosion of new use cases for data, new startups, new jobs, and new economic value. Tokens would (and must) have privacy, auditing, trust, value exchange, and the like built in (I tried to write this entire post without mentioned blockchain, but there, I just did it), but presuming they did, imagine what might be built if we truly set the data free, and instead of outsourcing its power and control to massive platforms, we took that power and control and, just like we did with the PC and the web, pushed it to the edge, to the node...to ourselves? I rather like the sound of that, and I suspect Mssr. Phelps would as well. Now, how might we get there? I've no idea, but exploring possible paths certainly sounds like an interesting project...

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GDPR Ain’t Helping Anyone In The Innovation Economy

jbat — Fri, 25 May 2018 19:30:31 +0000

(image)

It's somehow fitting that today, May 25th, marks my return to writing here on Searchblog, after a long absence driven in large part by the launch of NewCo Shift as a publication on Medium more than two years ago. Since then Medium has deprecated its support for publications (and abandoned its original advertising model), and I've soured even more than usual on "platforms," whether they be well intentioned (as I believe Medium is) or indifferent and fundamentally bad for publishing (as I believe Facebook to be).

So when I finally sat down to write something today, an ingrained but rusty habit re-emerged. For the past two years I've opened a clean, white page in Medium to write an essay, but today I find myself once again coding sentences into the backend of my Wordpress site. Searchblog has been active for 15 years - nearly forever in Internet time. It looks weary and crusty and overgrown, but it still stands upright, and soon it'll be getting a total rebuild, thanks to the folks at Wordpress. I'll also be moving NewCo Shift to a Wordpress site - we'll keep our presence on Medium mainly as a distribution point, which is pretty much all "platforms" are good for as it relates to publishers, in my opinion. So why is today a fitting day to return to the open web as my main writing outlet? Well, May 25th is the day the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) goes into effect. It's more likely than not that any reader of mine already knows all about GDPR, but for those who don't, it's the most significant new framework for data regulation in recent history. Not only does every company that does business with an EU citizen have to comply with GDPR, but most major Internet companies (like Google, Facebook, etc) have already announced they intend to export the "spirit" of GDPR to all of their customers, regardless of their physical location. Given that most governments still don't know how to think about data as a social or legal asset, GDPR is likely the most important new social contract between consumers, business, and government in the Internet's history. And to avoid burying the lead, I think it stinks for nearly all Internet companies, save the biggest ones. That's a pretty sweeping statement, and I'm not prepared to entirely defend it today, but I do want to explain why I've come to this conclusion. Before I do, however, it's worth laying out the fundamental principles driving GDPR. First and foremost, the legislation is a response to what many call "surveillance capitalism," a business model driven in large part (but not entirely) by the rise of digital marketing. The grievance is familiar: Corporations and governments are collecting too much data about consumers and citizens, often without our express consent. Our privacy and our "right to be left alone" are in peril. While we've collectively wrung our hands about this for years (I started thinking about "the Database of Intentions" back in 2001, and I offered a "Data Bill of Rights" back in 2007), it was Europe, with its particular history and sensitivities, which finally took significant and definitive action. While surveillance capitalism is best understood as a living system - an ecosystem made up of many different actors - there are essentially three main players when it comes to collecting and leveraging personal data. First are the Internet giants - companies like Amazon, Google, Netflix and Facebook. These companies are beloved by most consumers, and are driven almost entirely by their ability to turn the actions of their customers into data that they leverage at scale to feed their business models. These companies are best understood as "At Scale First Parties" - they have a direct relationship with their customers, and because we depend on their services, they can easily acquire consent from us to exploit our data. Ben Thompson calls these players "aggregators" - they've aggregated powerful first-party relationships with hundreds of millions or even billions of consumers. The second group are the thousands of adtech players, most notably visualized in the various Lumascapes. These are companies that have grown up in the tangled, mostly open mess of the World Wide Web, mainly in the service of the digital advertising business. They collect data on consumers' behaviors across the Internet and sell that data to marketers in an astonishingly varied and complex ways. Most of these companies have no "first party" relationship to consumers, instead they are "third parties" - they collect their data by securing relationships with sub-scale first parties like publishers and app makers. This entire ecosystem lives in an uneasy and increasingly weak position relative to the At Scale First Parties like Google and Facebook, who have inarguably consolidated power over the digital advertising marketplace. Now, some say that companies such as Netflix, Amazon and Apple are not driven by an advertising model, and therefore are free of the negative externalities incumbent to players like Facebook and Google. To this argument I gently remind the reader: All at scale "first party" companies leverage personal data to drive their business, regardless of whether they have "advertising" as their core revenue stream. And there are plenty of externalities, whether positive or negative, that arise when companies use data, processing power, and algorithms to determine what you might and might not experience through their services. The third major player in all of this, of course, are governments. Governments collect a shit ton of data about their citizens, but despite our fantasies about the US intelligence apparatus, they're not nearly as good at exploiting that data as are the first and third party corporate players. In fact, most governments rely heavily on corporate players to make sense of the data they control. That interplay is a story into itself, and I'm sure I'll get into it at a later date. Suffice to say that governments, particularly democratic governments, operate in a highly regulated environment when it comes to how they can use their citizens' data. But until recently, first and third party corporate entities have had pretty much free reign to do whatever they want with our data. Driven in large part by the United States' philosophy of "hands off the Internet" - a philosophy I wholeheartedly agreed with prior to the consolidation of the Internet by massive oligarchs - corporations have been regulated mainly by Terms of Services and End User License Agreements, rarely read legal contracts which give corporations sweeping control over how customer data is used. This all changed with GDPR, which went into effect today. There are seven principles as laid out by the regulatory body responsible for enforcement, covering fairness, usage, storage, accuracy, accountability, and so on. All of these are important, but I'm not going to get into the details in this post (it's already getting long, after all). What really matters is this: The intent of GDPR is to protect the privacy and rights of consumers against Surveillance Capitalism. But the reality of GDPR, as with nearly all sweeping regulation, is that it favors the At Scale First Parties, who can easily gain "consent" from the billions of consumers who use their services, and it significantly threatens the sub-scale first and third party ecosystem, who have tenuous or fleeting relationships with the consumers they indirectly serve. Put another way: You're quite likely to click "I Consent" or "Yes" when a GDPR form is put in between you and your next hit of Facebook dopamine. You're utterly unlikely to do the same when a small publisher asks for your consent via what feels like a spammy email. An excellent example of this power imbalance in action: Facebook kicking third-party data providers off its platform in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, conveniently using GDPR as an excuse to consolidate its power as an At Scale First Party (I wrote about this at length here). In short: because they have the scale, resources, and first party relationships in place, At Scale First Party companies can leverage GDPR to increase their power and further protect their businesses from smaller competitors. The innovation ecosystem loses, and the tech oligarchy is strengthened. I've long held that closed, walled-garden aggregators are terrible for innovation. They starve the open web of the currencies most crucial to growth: data, attention, and revenue. In fact, nearly all "innovators" on the open web are in thrall to Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and/or Google in some way or another - they depend on them for advertising services, for ecommerce, for data processing, for distribution, and/or for actual revenue. In another series of posts I intend to dig into what we might do about it. But now that the early returns are in, it's clear that GDPR, while well intentioned, has already delivered a massive and unexpected externality: Instead of limiting the reach of the most powerful players operating in the world of data, it has in fact achieved the opposite effect.

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My Predictions for 2018

jbat — Wed, 03 Jan 2018 23:50:29 +0000

(cross posted from NewCo Shift)

So many predictions from so many smart people these days. When I started doing these posts fifteen years ago, prognostication wasn’t much in the air. But a host of way-smarter-than-me folks are doing it now, and I have to admit I read them all before I sat down to do my own. So in advance, thanks to Fred, to Azeem, to Scott, and Alexis, among many others.

So let’s get into it. Regular readers know that while I think about these predictions in the back of my mind for months, I usually just sit down and write them at one sitting. That’s what happened a year ago, when I predicted that 2017 would see the tech industry lose its charmed status. It certainly did, and nearly everyone is predicting more of the same for 2018. So I won’t focus on the entire industry this year, as much as on specific companies and trends. Here we go….

Crypto/blockchain dies as a major story this year. I know, this is a silly thing to say given all the hype right now. But the Silicon Valley hype cycle is a pretty predictable thing, and while new currencies will continue to rise, fall, and make and lose tons of money, the overall narrative thrives on the new, and there’s simply too much real-but-boring work to be done right now in the space. Does anyone remember 1994? Sure, it’s the year the Mozilla team decamped from Illinois to the Valley, but it’s not the year the Web broke out as a mainstream story. That came a few years later. 2018 is a year of hard work on the problems that have kept blockchain from becoming what most of us believe it can truly become. And that kind of work doesn’t keep the public engaged all year long. Besides, everyone will be focused on much larger issues like…
Donald Trump blows up. 2018 is the year it all goes down, and when it does, it will happen quickly (in terms of its inevitability) and painfully slowly (in terms of it actually resolving). This of course is a terrible thing to predict for our country, but we got ourselves into this mess, and we’ll have to get ourselves out of it. It will be the defining story of the year.
Facts make a comeback. This has something to do with Trump’s failure, of course, but I think 2018 is the year the Enlightenment makes a robust return to the national conversation. Liberals will finally figure out that it’s utterly stupid to blame the “other side” for our nation’s troubles. Several viral memes will break out throughout the year focused on a core narrative of truth and fact. The 2018 elections will prove that our public is not rotten or corrupt, but merely susceptible to the same fever dreams we’ve always been susceptible to, and the fever always breaks. A rising tide of technology-driven engagement will help drive all of this. Yes, this is utterly optimistic. And yes, I can’t help being that way.
Tech stocks overall have a sideways year. That doesn’t meant they don’t rise like crazy early (already happening!), but that by year’s end, all the year in review stock pieces will note that tech didn’t drive the markets in the way they have over the past few years. This is because the Big Four have some troubles this coming year….
Amazon becomes a target. Amazon is the most overscrutinized yet still misunderstood company in all of tech. For years it’s built a muscular and opaque platform, and in 2017 it benefitted from the fact that, so far anyway, Russians haven’t found a way to use e-commerce to disrupt western democracy. Yes, Trump seems to have a bug up his bum about the company, but his tweets last year seemed to only increase Amazon’s teflon reputation with the rest of society. In 2018, however, things will change for the worse. The company is smart enough to keep hiding its power — it hasn’t accumulated the cash of its GAFA rivals, nor does it play (as much) in the high profile worlds of media and politics. But by 2018, the company will find itself painted into something of a box. Last year I thought the fear of automation and job losses would dominate the political discussion, but Russia managed to eclipse those concerns. This is the year Amazon becomes the poster child for future shock. In particular, I expect the company’s “Flex” business to come under serious scrutiny. And what it’s doing with in house brands is the equivalent of Google giving preference to its own products in search results (that hasn’t worked out so well in Europe). Further tarnishing its image will be its lack of leadership on social issues — Jeff Bezos is no Tim Cook when it comes to empathy. By year’s end, Amazon’s reputation will be in jeopardy. Then again, I do think the company will be nimbler than most in responding to that threat.
Google/Alphabet will have a terrible first half (reputation wise), but recover after that. Why a terrible first half? Well, I agree with Scott, there’s another shoe to drop in the whole Schmidt story, not to mention more EU fines and fake news fallout, and that will kick off a soul-searching first half for the search giant. The company will find itself flat-footed and in need of some traditional corporate revival tactics — ever since Page stepped back into the obscurity of Alphabet, the company has lacked a compelling overarching narrative. I’m not sure how the company recovers its mojo, but it could be by pushing deeper into a strategy of letting its children grow up outside the Alphabet conglomerate structure. Perhaps not a government driven breakup, per se, but a series of spin outs, led by Sundar Pichai (Google), Susan Wojcicki (YouTube), and perhaps a new spinout around Doubleclick/Adtech, possibly run by Neal Mohan. Alphabet will remain as a holding company with stakes in all these newly (or soon to be newly) public companies, as well as a place that incubates new ventures and figures out what the hell to do with Nest.
Facebook. Ah, what to say about Facebook. Well, let’s just say the company muddles through a slog of a year, with a lot of rearguard work politically, even as it starts to dawn on the world that maybe, just maybe, every advertiser in the world doesn’t want to be handcuffed to the company’s toxic engagement model. Of course, with YouTube in particular, Google has this issue as well, so here’s my Facebook prediction, which is more of an ad industry prediction: The Duopoly falls out of favor. No, this doesn’t mean year-on-year declines in revenue, but it does mean a falloff in year-on-year growth, and by the end of 2018, a increasingly vocal contingent of influencers inside the advertising world will speak out against the companies (they’re already speaking to me privately about it). One or two of them will publicly cut their spending and move it to other places, like programmatic (which will have a sideways year more than likely) and places like….
Pinterest breaks out. This one might prove my biggest whiff, or my biggest “nailed it,” hard to say. But for more, see my piece from earlier in the week. Advertisers will find comfort in Pinterest’s relatively uncontroversial model, and its increasingly good results. The big question is whether Pinterest can both scale its inventory in a predictable and contextual way, and whether it can make its self service/API-based platform super simple to use. Oh, and of course continue to attract a growing user base. Early signs are that it’s doing all three.
Autonomous vehicles do not become mainstream. I’ve said it before, I’m saying it again: This shit is complicated, and we’re not even close to ready. We’ll see a lot of cool pilots, and maybe even one (probably small) city will vote to let them run amuck. But I just don’t see it happening this year. However, I do think 2018 will be the year that electric vehicles are accepted as inevitable.
Business leads. Business doesn’t change by fiat, it changes through the slow uptake of new social norms. And a crucial new norm in business poised to have a breakout year is the expectation that companies take their responsibilities to all stakeholders as seriously as they take their duty to shareholders. “All stakeholders” means more than customers and employees, it means actually adding value to society beyond just their product or service. 2018 will be the year of “positive externalities” in business, and yes, NewCo will be there to take notes on those companies who manage to live up to this new normal. A good place to start, of course, is the Shift Forum in less than two months. I hope to see you there, and have a great 2018!

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Predictions 2017 – How’d I Do This Year?

jbat — Tue, 19 Dec 2017 19:28:05 +0000

Every year, I make predictions, and every year, I score myself. As I wrote nearly 12 months ago, 2017 felt particularly unpredictable. As it turns out, my musings were often on target. Except when they weren’t...

I’ve played with all manners of scoring over the years, but this year I’m going with a straight zero to ten rating. Zero if I whiffed entirely, ten if I hit it out of the park, and some kind of partial credit in between. Then add ‘em up, divide by the number of predictions, and that’ll be my overall batting average.

So let’s see how I did. I made ten predictions, so to each in turn….

#1: The bloom comes off the tech industry rose. I believe I hit this one out of the park. The backlash is at such a fever pitch, it seems tech has been crucified forever, but I peg the beginning of the end at Susan Fowler’s astonishing takedown of Uber, which was posted in mid February of 2017. Not only did her revelations precipitate the fall of Travis Kalanick and set the tone for the #MeToo movement in tech, it also gave the press an antagonist it could truly villainize, which set the stage for later takedowns of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple. Multiple books (the Four, World Without Mind, etc) piled on, as did the Russia/Facebook sh*tshow (and hearings), and the concerns of former tech engineers like Tristan Harris, whose “Time Well Spent” movement broke out in 2017. Overall, it was one hell of a bad year for tech (and to be honest, tech brought it on itself), and my words in January certainly rang true: “2017 will be the year the industry is cast as a villain — for its ravenous and largely opaque data collection practices, its closed and self-serving approach to its own platforms, and its refusal to acknowledge or address the very real externalities…created by its products and services.”Score: 10 of 10.

#2: The conversation economy breaks out. This one is harder to judge. You may recall that a year ago, chatbots were all the rage, and voice-based interfaces like Alexa and Google Home were a novelty. One year later, chatbots have faded (but “appbots” are on the rise), and voice-driven systems have secured a place in our shared culture. That was a fast rise, comparatively speaking. In my post, I wrote: “Combine smart chat with voice, and … well, we’ll start to see a new UX for the web.” I still think that’s true, and we’ve had a year of very promising developments. But was it a breakout year? History alone will tell. Score: 5 of 10.

#3. Open starts to win again. Oh boy. Every year I have what you might call an aspirational post, in that I very much hope it will come true, but I’m pretty sure it won’t come true. What I do know, however, is that in 2017, the table was well and truly set for open approaches to make a comeback. The reason? Well, see #1: Tech’s gotten too big, and too powerful, and the best way to dissemble that power is a swing back to open data (see this post for more). I remain firmly convinced that open is on the rise. But I don’t have much proof that 2017 is the year that trend began “to win again.” I wrote a year ago: “This year won’t be a turning point in this battle, but it will show meaningful progress.” It’s true that Amazon, Google, and Apple managed to settle their differences, and Microsoft Cortana laid down with Alexa, (and this) but…a dramatic proof of my thesis did not emerge this year. Score: 4 of 10.

#4. Privacy will become a strong product category. I didn’t exactly predict the Equifax, Verizon, Uber, and scores of other data breaches which occurred this year, but they certainly reinforced my premise for prediction #4: Privacy is now front and center for all businesses and consumers. The question remains, however, if anyone will actually make a decent product suite that protects our privacy. Certainly in the business to business realm, privacy as a product boomed this year (there’s not a board in the world that didn’t authorize more spend for security this year). But last year I wrote: “But fear of cyber warfare, fraud, and over-reaching marketers and government will create huge openings for consumer friendly versions of currently opaque products like PGP, password managers, and the like.” Well, the openings are there. But the products? Not so much. Yet. Score: 7 of 10.

#5. Adtech has a ripper of a year. OK, there has to be one that was pretty much a whiff, and this one is likely it. I am still an adtech bull, and the market still grew, if mainly led by Facebook, Amazon, and Google. But the independent adtech business did not have a ripper of a year, instead, it was a year of retrenching, mostly. Yes, good growth and strong business, but not the breakout I had predicted. Score: 2 of 10.

#6. Apple releases a truly bad hardware product. Damn, if only Apple hadn’t pulled its HomePod product this year! Because if it had actually released it, it would have laid a massive egg, I’m sure of it (the company simply does not have the AI, voice recognition, and software chops). Instead, Apple was wise enough to realize it had a dud on its hand, and delayed what would have been a stinker of a consumer product. I even predicted it would be the HomePod that lays the egg…maybe someone at Apple reads me? In any case, I think I should get partial credit here, because besides predicting a bad release (the Watch release was pretty bumpy, after all), I also predicted 2017 would be the year the press turns on Apple, and that Apple would respond by acting like a typical corporation (repatriating cash to curry favor, buying companies to enter new markets, etc). It’s well on its way to doing just that (just bought Shazam, for example, and isn’t exactly fighting the tax bill). Score: 6 of 10.

#7. A Fortune 100 company will announce its intention to become a B Corp. Nope. Wishful thinking. Despite Paul Polman *sounding* like the CEO of a B Corp on Twitter all year long, this did not happen. Move along, nothing to see here. Score: 0 out of 10.

#8. President Trump leaves Twitter. Ha! He was kicked off by a mischeivious contractor, for ten whole minutes! I was…wrong. It’s true, debate did rage about why the president *should* be kicked off, and there’s still a few days left for Trump to decide he’s bigger than the blue bird, but besides that technicality, for which I am giving myself at least partial credit, this did not happen. SAD! Score: 2 of 10

#9. Snap soars — then sours. This is where a picture is worth a thousand words:

Score: 10 of 10.

10. Human connection commands a premium in the workforce. In this prediction I also wrote: “In 2017, we’ll come to realize that we’re valuing the wrong things, and start a conversation about paying people to connect with each other — because if we can automate the other stuff, why the heck wouldn’t we value each other more?! Related: The conversation around Universal Basic Income (or my preferred term, the Citizens’ Dividend) will become white hot.” So it’s complicated, but I think overall the conversation around the future of work and UBI did become white hot, and we did see a marked shift toward valuing human connection in the workplace. However, it’s rather hard for me to prove that inside of just this year. As with a few of my predictions, only time will tell. So I’ll score myself a partial win on this one. Score: 6 of 10.

So pulling back, how did I do, overall? Two whiffs (Adtech, B Corps), two home runs (tech backlash, Snap), three that were largely wins, one push, and two that were partial credit. Better than 50% — a score of 52 on a total of 100 points. Not terrible — about average over my nearly 15 years of doing this, stellar if you’re a major leaguer (of course, an “F” without a curve…). Regardless, I always have fun both making these predictions, and scoring myself against them twelve months later. I am honored that you take time to read my work, and I’ll be back early in the new year with predictions for 2018. Util then, have a great holiday season, everybody!

Related:

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Data Concentration In Platforms – A Modest Proposal

jbat — Wed, 13 Dec 2017 04:01:15 +0000

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(I've been writing on NewCo Shift for the most part, but I wanted my Searchblog readers to know two things: One, I'm working on getting this site totally redone, and will be posting here in the New Year. And two, I really feel awful about how I've neglected this site. All of that will change next year.) ----

Over the past few years I’ve been looking for a grand unifying theory that explains my growing discomfort with technology, an industry for which I’ve been a mostly unabashed cheerleader these past three decades.

I think it all comes down to how our society manages its most crucial new resource: Data.

That our largest technology companies have cornered the market on the data that powers our society’s most important functions is not in question. Who better than Amazon understands at-scale patterns in commerce (and with AWS, our demand for compute-related resources)? Who better than Google understands what products, services, and knowledge we want, and our path to finding them? Who better than Facebook understands our relationships to others and our interaction with (often bad) ideas? And who better than Apple (and Google) understand the applications, services, and entertainment we choose to engage with every day (not to mention our location, our ID, our most personal data, and on and on)?

These companies also dominate two crucial assets related to data: The compute power necessary to translate data into actionable insights, and the human talent required to leverage them both. Taken together, these three assets — massive amounts of data, massive compute platforms, and legions of highly trained engineers and data scientists — represent our society’s best path to understanding itself, and thereby improving all of our lives.

If anything should be defined as a public good — “a commodity or service provided without profit to all members of a society” — it should be the ability to study and understand society toward a goal of improving everyone’s lives.

But over the past decade, the most valuable data, processing power, and people have become concentrated in a handful of private companies that have demonstrated an almost genetic unwillingness to share their platform as a public good. Sure, they’ll happily share their platforms’ output — their consumer products — as for-profit services. And yes, each of us as consumers can benefit greatly from free social media, free search, free access to the “Everything Store,” and expensive but oh-so-worth-it smart phones.

But while each of us gets to benefit individually, none of us get to benefit from the wholistic, aggregated view of the world that the tech oligarchy has over its billions of consumers. And only the tech platforms — and their shareholders — are accruing the benefit of that perspective.

Why am I on about this? Because having access to good, at-scale data, and the platforms and people to learn from that data, is a clear proxy for progress in our society. We all marvel at the extraordinary capabilities, profits, and market caps of the tech platforms. They are the modern equivalents of the industrial powerhouses that transformed the American landscape in the early 20th century.

Back then, what was good for GM was good for the USA. But when we went to war, we went to war in partnership with those companies. GM, Alcoa, US Steel and their peers’ capitalistic platforms became our government’s most important wartime assets.

And while it feels odd to write this, no serious scholar of modern geopolitics disputes that we are now at war — a new kind of information-based war, but war, nevertheless — with Russia in particular, but in all honesty, with a multitude of nation states and stateless actors bent on destroying western democratic capitalism. They are using our most sophisticated and complex technology platforms to wage this war — and so far, we’re losing. Badly.

Why? According to sources I’ve talked to both at the big tech companies and in government, each side feels the other is ignorant, arrogant, misguided, and incapable of understanding the other side’s point of view. There’s almost no data sharing, trust, or cooperation between them. We’re stuck in an old model of lobbying, soft power, and the occasional confrontational hearing.

Not exactly the kind of public-private partnership we need to win a war, much less a peace.

Am I arguing that the government should take over Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple so as to beat back Russian info-ops? No, of course not.But our current response to Russian aggression illustrates the lack of partnership and co-ordination between government and our most valuable private sector companies. And I am hoping to raise an alarm: When the private sector has markedly better information, processing power, and personnel than the public sector, one will only strengthen, while the latter will weaken. We’re seeing it play out in our current politics, and if you believe in the American idea, you should be extremely concerned.

During WWII, the US economy mobilized, growing at more than 10 percent for several years in a row. Sweeping new partnerships were established between large American corporations, new entrants to the workforce (black Americans and women in particular), and the government. And when the war was won, the peace dividend drove the United States to its current position as the most powerful nation — and economy — on the planet.

We desperately need a new compact between business and government, in particular as it relates to the most important resources in our society: data, processing power, and human intellectual capital.

In my next column I’ll dive into ideas for how we might mitigate our current imbalance, and the role that anti-trust may — or may not — play in that rebalancing. (Update, here it is.)

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Amazon’s HQ2 Isn’t a Headquarters. So What Is It?

jbat — Thu, 28 Sep 2017 13:54:54 +0000

Crossposted from NewCo Shift.

Everyone’s favorite parlor game is “where will Amazon go?” Better to ask: Why does Amazon needs a second headquarters in the first place?

It’s the future! Rendering of Amazon's new Seattle HQ. The first and original one.

Why does Amazon want a new headquarters? Peruse the company’s RFP, and the company is frustratingly vague on the question. “Due to the successful growth of the Company,” Amazon says of itself in the royal third person, “it now requires a second corporate headquarters in North America.”

“It requires”?

Is this a request for bulk discounts on toner ink? Did Jeff Bezos outsource this momentous and extremely public communication to his purchasing department? Is there really no more room in Seattle?

So…Why? Why is Amazon doing this? If I were one of the hundreds of Mayors and local civic boosters huddling in meeting rooms around North America, that would be my first — and pretty much my only question. After all, if you don’t know why Amazon is looking for a “second headquarters,” then your response to their RFP is going to end up pretty rudderless. If Amazon’s true reason for another HQ boils down to, say, Latin American expansion, then Chicago, Toronto, and Philly should pretty much pack in in, no?

While the RFP is comprehensive in requirements (transportation networks, nearby international airports, sustainable office space, etc.), it nevertheless demonstrates a stunning lack of vision — the very vision that once defined “startups” like Amazon. The current accepted mythology about our fabled tech companies, those lions of our present economic theatre, is that they are fonts of vision — driven not just by profit, but by outsized missions to change the world, and to make it better. So what mission, exactly, will this new headquarter actually be charged with? Can anyone answer that? Absent any serious data, the default becomes “to expand Amazon.” And what, exactly, might that mean?

Amazon’s lists of current and projected businesses include e-commerce (its core), entertainment, home automation, cloud services, white label products, logistics and delivery, and any number of adjacent businesses yet to be scaled. It also harbors serious international expansion plans (one would presume). Any and all of these businesses might inform the “why” of its Bachelor-like RFP. But nowhere in the RFP does the company deliver a clue as to whether these factors play into its decision.

I have a theory about why Amazon issued such a vision-free RFP — and why the world responded with a parlor game instead of a serious inquiry as to the motivations of “the most valuable company in the world.” And that theory comes down to this: Amazon needs a place to put workers that are secondary but necessary — back office service, lower level engineering talent, accounting, compliance, administrative support. It will move those support positions to the city that has the cheapest cost per seat, and consolidate its “high value” workers in Seattle, where such talent is already significantly concentrated.

Put another way, “HQ2” isn’t a headquarters at all. But calling it one insures a lot more attention, a lot more concessions, and a lot more positive PR. Maybe Amazon doesn’t have an answer to the question, and is hoping its call for proposals will deliver it a fresh new vision for the future. But I doubt it.

I’d love to be wrong, but absent any other vision the most likely reasoning behind this beauty pageant boils down to money. It may sound like the cynical logic of a rapacious capitalist — but more often than not, that’s what usually drives business in the first place.

The post Amazon’s HQ2 Isn’t a Headquarters. So What Is It? appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

This Is What Happens When Context Is Lost.

jbat — Fri, 15 Sep 2017 23:37:52 +0000

(Cross posted from NewCo Shift)

Facebook and Google’s advertising infrastructure is one of humanity’s most marvelous creations. It’s also one of its most terrifying, because, in truth, pretty much no one really understands how it works. Not Mark Zuckerberg, not Larry Page, and certainly not Russian investigator Robert Mueller, although of the bunch, it seems Mueller is the most interested in that fact.

And that’s a massive problem for Facebook and Google, who have been dragged to the stocks over their algorithms’ inability to, well, act like a rational and dignified human being.

So how did the world’s most valuable and ubiquitous companies get here, and what can be done about it?

Well, let’s pull back and consider how these two tech giants execute their core business model, which of course is advertising. You might want to pour yourself an adult beverage and settle in, because by the end of this, the odds of you wanting the cold comfort of a bourbon on ice are pretty high.

In the beginning (OK, let’s just say before the year 2000), advertising was a pretty simple business. You chose your intended audience (the target), you chose your message (the creative), and then you chose your delivery vehicle (the media plan). That media plan involved identifying publications, television programs, and radio stations where your target audience was engaged.

Those media outlets lived in a world regulated by certain hard and fast rules around what constituted appropriate speech. The FCC made sure you couldn’t go full George Carlin in your creative execution, for example. The FTC made sure you couldn’t commit fraud. And the FEC — that’s the regulatory body responsible for insuring fairness and transparency in paid political speech — the FEC made sure that when audiences were targeted with creative that supports one candidate or another, those audiences could know who was behind same-said creative.

But that neat framework has been thoroughly and utterly upended on the Internet, which, as you might recall, has mostly viewed regulation as damage to be routed around.

After all, empowering three major Federal regulatory bodies dedicated to old media advertising practices seems like an awful lot of liberal overkill, n’est ce pas? What waste! And speaking of waste, honestly, if you want to “target” your audience, why bother with “media outlets” anyway?! Everyone knows that Wanamaker was right — in the offline world, half your advertising is wasted, and thanks to offline’s lack of precise targeting, no one has a clue which half that might be.

But as we consider tossing the offline baby out with the bathwater waste, it’s wise to remember a critical element of the offline model that may well save us as we begin to sort through the mess we’re currently in. That element can be understood via a single word: Context. But we’ll get to that in a minute. First, let’s go back to our story of how advertising has shifted in an online world, and the unintended consequences of that shift (if you want a even more thorough take, head over to Rick Webb’s NewCo Shift series: Which Half Is Wasted).

Google: Millions Flock to Self Service, Rise of the Algos

Back in the year 2000, Google rolled out AdWords, a fantastically precise targeting technology that allowed just about anyone to target their advertisements to…just about anyone, as long as that person was typing a search term into Google’s rapidly growing service. (Keep that “anyone” word in mind, it’ll come back to haunt us later.) AdWords worked best when you used it directly on Google’s site — because your ad came up as a search result right next to the “organic” results. If your ad was contextually relevant to a user’s search query, it had a good chance of “winning” — and the prize was a potential customer clicking over to your “landing page.” What you did with them then was your business, not Google’s.

As you can tell from my fetishistic italicization, in this early portion of the digital ad revolution, context still mattered. Google next rolled out “AdSense,” which placed AdWords on publishers’ pages around the Internet. AdSense didn’t work as well as AdWords on Google’s own site, but it still worked pretty well, because it was driven by context — the AdSense system scanned the web pages on which its ads were placed, and attempted to place relevant AdWordsin context there. Sometimes it did so clumsily, sometimes it did so with spectacular precision. Net net, it did it well enough to start a revolution.

Within a few years, AdWords and AdSense brought billions of dollars of revenue to Google, and it reshaped the habits of millions of advertisers large and small. In fact, AdWords brought an entirely new class of advertiser into the fold — small time business owners who could compete on a level playing field with massive brands. It also reshaped the efforts of thousands of publishers, many of whom dedicated small armies of humans to game AdWords’ algorithms and fraudulently drink the advertisers’ milk shakes. Google fought back, employing thousands of engineers to ward off spam, fraud, and bad actors.

AdWords didn’t let advertisers target individuals based on their deeply personal information, at least not in its first decade or so of existence. Instead, you targeted based on the expressed intention of individuals — either their search query (if on Google’s own site), or the context of what they were reading on sites all over the web. And over time, Google developed what seemed like insanely smart algorithms which helped advertisers find their audiences, deliver their messaging, and optimize their results.

The government mostly stayed out of Google’s way during this period.

When Google went public in 2004, it was estimated that between 15 to 25 percent of advertising on its platform was fraudulent. But advertisers didn’t care — after all, that’s a lot less waste than over in Wanamaker land, right? Google’s IPO was, for a period of time, the most successful offering in the history of tech.

Facebook: People Based Marketing FTW

Then along came Facebook. Facebook was a social network where legions of users voluntarily offered personally identifying information in exchange for the right to poke each other, like each other, and share their baby pictures with each other.

Facebook’s founders knew their future lay in connecting that trove of user data to a massive ad platform. In 2008, they hired Sheryl Sandberg, who ran Google’s advertising operation, and within a few years, Facebook had built the foundation of what is now the most ruthlessly precise targeting engine on the planet.

Facebook took nearly all the world-beating characteristics of Google’s AdWords and added the crack cocaine of personal data. Its self service platform, which opened for business a year or so after Sandberg joined, was hailed as ‘ridiculously easy to use.’ Facebook began to grow by leaps and bounds. Not only did everyone in the industrialized world get a Facebook account, every advertiser in the industrialized world got themselves a Facebook advertising account. Google had already plowed the field, after all. All Facebook had to do was add the informational seed.

Both Google and Facebook’s systems were essentially open — as we established earlier, just about anyone could sign up and start buying algorithmically generated ads targeted to infinite numbers of “audiences.” By 2013 or so, Google had gotten into the personalization game, albeit most folks would admit it wasn’t nearly as good as Facebook’s, but still, way better than the offline world.

So how does Facebook’s ad system work? Well, just like Google, it’s accessed through a self-service platform that lets you target your audiences using Facebook data. And because Facebook knows an awful lot about its users, you can target those users with astounding precision. You want women, 30–34, with two kids who live in the suburbs? Piece of cake. Men, 18–21 with an interest in acid house music, cosplay, and scientology? Done! And just like Google, Facebook employed legions of algorithms which helped advertisers find their audiences, deliver their messaging, and optimize their results. A massive ecosystem of advertisers flocked to Facebook’s new platform, lured by what appeared to be the Holy Grail of their customer acquisition dreams: People Based Marketing!

The government mostly stayed out of Facebook’s way during this period.

When Facebook went public in 2012, it estimated that only 1.5% of its nearly one billion accounts were fraudulent. A handful of advertisers begged to differ, but they were probably just using the system wrong. Sad!

Facebook’s IPO quickly became the most successful IPO in the history of tech. (Till Alibaba, of course. But that’s another story).

(Meanwhile, Programmatic.)

The programmatic Lumascape. Seems uncomplicated, right?

Stunned by the rise of the Google/Facebook duopoly, the tech industry responded with an open web answer: Programmatic advertising. Using cookies, mobile IDs, and tons of related data gathered from users as they surfed the web, hundreds of startups built an open-source version of Facebook and Google’s walled gardens. Programmatic was driven almost entirely by the concept of “audience buying” — the purchase of a specific audience segment regardless of the context in which that audience resided. The programmatic industry quickly scaled to billions of dollars — advertisers loved its price tag (open web ads were far cheaper), and its seemingly amazing return on investment (driven in large part by fraud and bad KPIs, but that’s yet another post).

Facebook and Google were unfazed by the rise of programmatic. In fact, they bought the best companies in the field, and incorporated their technologies into their ever advancing platforms.

The Storm Clouds Gather

But a funny thing happened as Google, Facebook and the programmatic industry rewrote advertising history. Now that advertisers could precisely identify and target audiences on Facebook, Google and across the web, they no longer needed to use media outlets as a proxy for those audiences. Media companies began to fall out of favor with advertisers and subsequently fail in large numbers. Google and Facebook became advertisers’ primary audience acquisition machines. Marketers poured the majority of their budgets into the duopoly — 70–85% of all digital advertising dollars go to the one or the other of them, and nearly all growth in digital marketing spend is attributable to them as well.

By 2011, regulators began to wrap their heads around this burgeoning field. Up till then, Internet ads were exempt from political regulations governing television, print, and other non digital outlets. In fact, both Facebook and Google have both lobbied the FEC, at various times over the past decade or so, to exclude their platforms from the vagaries of regulatory oversight based on an exemption for, and I am not making this up, “bumper stickers, pins, buttons, pens and similar small items” where posting a disclaimer is impracticable (sky writing is also mentioned). AdWords and mobile feed ads were small, after all. And everyone knows the Internet has limited space for disclaimers, right?

Anyway, that was the state of play up until 2011, when Facebook submitted a request to the FEC to clear the issue up once and for all. With a huge election coming in 2012, it was both wise and proactive of Facebook to want to clarify the matter, lest they find themselves on the wrong end of a regulatory ruling with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line.

The FEC failed to clarify its position, but did request comment from industry and the public on the issue (PDF). In essence, things remained status quo, and nothing happened for several years.

That set the table for the election of 2016. In October of that year, perhaps realizing it had done nothing for half a decade while the most powerful advertising machine in the history of ever slowly marched toward its seemingly inevitable date with emergent super intelligence, the FEC re-opened its request for comments on the whether or not political advertising on the Internet should have some trace of transparency. But that was far too late for the 2016 election.

The rest, as they inevitably say, is history in the making.

Time will tell, I suppose.

So Now What?

Most everyone I speak to tells me that last week’s revelations about Facebook, Russia, and political advertising is, in the words of Senator Mark Warner, “the tip of the iceberg.” Whether or not that’s true (and I for one am quite certain it is), it’s plenty enough to bring the issue directly to the forefront of our political and regulatory debate.

Now the news is coming fast and furious: At what was supposed to be a relatively quotidian regular meeting of the FEC this week, the commissioners voted unanimously to re-open (again) the comment period on Internet transparency. The Campaign Legal Center, launched in 2002 by a Republican ally of Senator John McCain (co-sponsor of the McCain Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002), this week issued a release calling for Facebook to disclose any and all ads purchased by foreign agents. (Would that it were that simple, but we’ll get to that in the next installment.) One of the six FEC commissioners, a Democrat, subsequently penned an impassioned Op Ed in the Washington Post, calling for a new regulatory framework that would protect American democracy from foreign meddling. The catch? The Republicans on the commission refuse to consider any regulations unless the commission receives “enough substantive written comments.”

Once the link for comments goes up in a week or two, I’m pretty sure they will.

But in the meantime, there’s plenty of chin stroking to be done over this issue. While this may seem like a dust up limited to the transparency of political advertising on the internet, the real story is vastly larger and more complicated. The wheels of western capitalism are greased by paid speech, and online, much of that speech is protected by the first amendment to our constitution, as well as established policies enshrined in contract law between Facebook, Google, and their clients. There are innumerable scenarios where a company or organization demands opacity around its advertising efforts. So many, in fact, that if I were to go into them now, I’d extend this piece by another 2,500 words.

And given I’m now close to 3,000 words in what was supposed to be a 600-word column, I’m going to leave exploring those scenarios, and their impact, to next week’s columns. In the meantime, I’ll be speaking with as many experts and policy folks from tech, Washington, and media as I can find. Suffice to say, big regulation is coming for big tech. Never in the history of the tech industry has the 1996 CDMA ruling granting tech platforms immunity from the consequences of speech on their own platforms been more germane. Whether it’s in jeopardy or not remains to be seen.

This is not a simple issue, and resolving it will require a level of rational discourse and debate that’s been starkly absent from our national dialog these past few years. At stake is not only the fundamental advertising models that built our most valuable tech companies, but also the essential forces and presumptions driving our system of democratic capitalism*. Not to mention the nascent but utterly critical debate around the role of algorithms in civil society. And as we explore solutions to what increasingly feels like an intractable set of questions, we’d do well to keep one word in mind: Context.

*Ask yourselves this: Are the advertising platforms behind Alibaba and Tencent worried about transparency?

The post This Is What Happens When Context Is Lost. appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

The Data Deal Is Opaque. We Should Fix It.

jbat — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 20:46:21 +0000

I wrote this post over on NewCo Shift, but it's germane to the topics here on Searchblog, so I'm cross posting here...

What Did You Think They Do With Your Data?

Admit it, you know your data is how you pay for free services. And you’re cool with it. So let’s get the value exchange right.

Topping the charts on TechMeme yesterday is this story:

So as to be clear, what’s going on here is this: AccuWeather was sharing its users’ anonymized data with a third-party company for profit, even after those same users seemingly opted out of location-based data collection.

But the actual story is more complicated.

Because….come on. Is anyone really still under the impression that your data isn’t what you’re trading for free weather, anywhere, anytime, by the hour? For free e-mail services? For free social media like Instagram or Facebook? For pretty much free everything?

All day long, you’re giving your data up. This is NOT NEW. Technically, what AcccuWeather did is more than likely legal, but it violates the Spirit Of Customers Are Always Right, Even If They Don’t Know What They Are Talking About. It also fails the Front Page Test, and well, when that happens it’s time for a crucifixion!

Hold on, a reasonable person might argue, sensing I’m arguing a disagreeable case. The user opted out, right? In this instance the user (and we can’t call them a “customer,” because a customer traditionally pays money for something) did in fact explicitly tell the app to NOT access their location. Here’s the screen shot in that story:

But what does that really mean? Access for what? Under what circumstance? My guess is AcccuWeather asked this question for a very specific reason: When an app uses your location to deliver you information, it can get super creepy, super fast. It’s best to ask permission, so the user gets comfortable with the app “knowing” so much about where the user is. This opt out message has nothing to do with the use of location data for third party monetization. Nothing at all.

In fact, AccuWeather is not sharing location data, at least not in a way that contradicts what they’ve communicated. Once you ask it not to, the AccuWeather app most certainly does NOT use your location information to in any way inform the user’s experience within the app.

Here’s what AccuWeather should ask its users, if it wanted to be totally honest about the value exchange inherent in the use of free apps:

“Ban AcccuWeather from using your anonymized data so AccuWeather, which really likes giving you free weather information, can stay in business?”

But nope, it surely doesn’t say that.

Yet if we want to get all huffy about use of data, well, that’s really what’s going on here. Because if you’re a publisher, in the past five years you’ve had your contextual advertising revenue* stripped from your P&L. And if you’re going to make it past next Thursday, you have to start monetizing the one thing you have left: Your audience data.

AcccuWeather is a publisher. Publishers are under assault from a massive shift in value extraction, away from the point of audience value delivery (the weather, free, to your eyeballs!) and to the point of audience aggregation (Facebook, Google, Amazon). All of these massive platforms can sell an advertiser audiences who check the local weather, six ways to Sunday.** If you’re an advertiser, why buy those audiences on an actual weather site? It’s easier, cheaper, and far safer to just buy them from the Big Guys.

Publishers need revenue to replace those lost direct ads, so they sell our data — anonymized and triangulated, mind you — so they can stay in business. Because for publishers, advertising as a business sucks right about now.

Anyway. AcccuWeather has already responded to the story. Scolded by an industry that fails to think deeply about what’s really going on in its own backyard, AccuWeather is now appropriately abject, and will “fix” the problem within 24 hours. But that really won’t fix the damn problem.***

* and that’s another post.
**and with a lot more detailed data!
***and that’s probably a much longer post.

Walmart and Google: A Match Made By Amazon

The retail and online worlds collided late yesterday with the news that Google and Walmart are hooking up in a stunning e-commerce partnership. Walmart will make its impressive inventory and distribution network available to shoppers on Google’s Express e-commerce service. This market the first time Walmart has leveraged its massive inventory and distribution assets outside its own e-commerce offerings. A few weeks ago I predicted in this space that Walmart would hook up with Facebook or Pinterest. I should have realized Google made more sense — though I’m sure there’s still room for more partnerships in this evolving retail landscape.

Those 1.3 million Records We Wanted? Never Mind.

Defenders of citizen’s rights briefly went on high alert when the Department of Justice subpoenaed the IP addresses (and much more) for every single visitor to an anti-Trump website. The web hosting company at the business end of that subpoena, DreamHost, went public with the request, which alerted the world to the government’s unreasonable demands. As the outcry grew, the DOJ relented, saying yesterday, in effect, “never mind, just kidding.” Here’s what chills me — and should chill you: What if DreamHost hadn’t stood up to the man?

The post The Data Deal Is Opaque. We Should Fix It. appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

No. Social Terrorists Will Not Win

jbat — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 02:42:37 +0000

A small group of social terrorists have hijacked the rational discourse led by society’s most accomplished, intelligent, and promising organizations. (cross posted from NewCo Shift) Let’s start with this: Google is not a perfect company. It’s easy to cast it as an omniscient and evil villain, the leader of a millennium-spanning illuminati hellbent on world subjugation. Google the oppressor. Google the silencer of debate. Google, satanic overlord predicted by the holy text! But that narrative is bullshit, and all rational humans know it. Yes, we have to pay close attention — and keep our powder dry — when a company with the power and reach of Google (or Facebook, or Amazon, or Apple…) finds itself a leader in the dominant cultural conversation of our times. But when a legitimate and fundamentally important debate breaks out, and the company’s employees try to come together to understand its nuances, to find a path forward …..To threaten those engaged in that conversation with physical violence? That’s fucking terrorism, period. And it’s damn well time we called it that. Have we lost all deference to the hard won lessons of the past few hundred years? Are we done with enlightenment, with scientific discourse, with fucking manners? Do we now believe progress can only be imposed? Have we abandoned debate? Can we no longer engage in rational discourse, or move forward by attempting to understand each other’s point of view? I’m so fucking angry that the asshat trolls managed to force Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai to cancel his planned all hands meeting today, one half hour before it started, I’m finding it hard to even write. Before I can continue, I just need to say this. To scream it, and then I’m sure I’ll come to my senses: FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU, asshats, for hijacking the conversation, for using physical threats, implied or otherwise, as a weapon to shut down legitimate rational discourse. FUCK YOU for paralyzing one of our society’s most admired, intelligent, and successful engines of capitalism, FUCK YOU for your bullying, FUCK YOU for your rage and your anger, FUCK YOU for making me feel just like I am sure you feel about me: I want to fucking kick your fucking ass. But now I will take a breath. And I will remember this: The emotions of that last paragraph never move us forward. Ever. Google was gathering today to have an honest, difficult, and most likely emotional conversation about the most important idea in our society at present: How to allow all of us to have the right to our points of view, while at the same time insuring the application of those views don’t endanger or injure others. For its entire history, this company has had an open and transparent dialog about difficult issues. This is the first time that I’ve ever heard of where that dialog has been cancelled because of threats of violence. This idea Google was preparing to debate is difficult. This idea, and the conflict it engenders, is not a finished product. It is a work in progress. It is not unique to Google. Nor is it unique to Apple, or Facebook, Microsoft or Apple — it could have easily arisen and been leapt upon by social terrorists at any of those companies. That it happened at Google is not the point. Because this idea is far bigger than any of those companies. This idea is at the center of our very understanding of reality. At the center of our American idea. Painstakingly, and not without failure, we have developed social institutions — governments, corporations, churches, universities, the press — to help us navigate this conflict. We have developed an approach to cultural dialog that honors respect, abjures violence, accepts truth. We don’t have figured it out entirely. But we can’t abandon the core principles that have allowed us to move so far forward. And that is exactly what the social terrorists want: For us to give up, for us to abandon rational discourse. Google is a company comprised of tens of thousands of our finest minds. From conversations I’ve had tonight, many, if not most of those who work there are fearful for their safety and that of their loved ones. Two days ago, they were worried about their ability to speak freely and express their opinions. Today, because social terrorists have gone nuclear, those who disagree with those terrorists — the vast majority of Googlers, and by the way, the vast majority of the world — are fearful for their physical safety. And because of that, open and transparent debate has been shut down. What. The. Fuck. If because of physical threat we can no longer discuss the nuanced points of a difficult issue, then America dies, and so does our democracy. This cannot stand. Google has promised to have its dialog, but now it will happen behind closed doors, in secrecy and cloaked in security that social terrorists will claim proves collusion. Well done, asshats. You’ve created your own reality. It’s up to us to not let that reality become the world’s reality. It’s time to stand up to social terrorists. They cannot and must not win.

The post No. Social Terrorists Will Not Win appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.

My New Column – Please Sign Up!

jbat — Sat, 05 Aug 2017 13:12:35 +0000

Hi Searchblog readers. I know it's been a while. But I'm writing a new column over at NewCo Shift, and instead of posting it verbatim here every other day (it comes out three times a week), I figured I'd let you know, and if you'd like to read it (my musings are pretty Searchbloggy, to be honest), you can get it right in your inbox by signing up for the NewCo Daily newsletter right here. Here are my columns so far: Is Social Media The New Tobacco? Dow 36,000? Bears and Dragons Bite Tech Where It Hurts Memo to Tech’s Titans: Please Remember What It Was Like to Be Small Don’t Quite Grok Blockchain? We Got You Covered. This Is How Walmart Will Defend Itself Against Amazon Facebook’s Data Trove May Well Determine Trump’s Fate Google and Amazon Hit the Feed Trough A Trio of Tech Takedowns Thanks for reading Searchblog. I'll continue to post stuff here - but probably not every column, which are meant to be short takes on key news of the day.

The post My New Column – Please Sign Up! appeared first on John Battelle's Search Blog.