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The Monopoly Report
Episode 41: DuckDuckGo on balancing privacy and competition in the ads space
00:52:06
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- [00:01]
Alan Chappelle
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- [00:52]
Camille Bazbaz
Welcome to the Monopoly Report the Monopoly Report is dedicated to chronicling and analyzing the impact of antitrust and other regulations on on the global advertising economy. I'm Alan Chappelle. This week my guests are Camille Bazbaz and Joe Jerome from DuckDuckGo. Camille serves as Senior Vice President of public affairs at DuckDuckGo, where he leads the company's global public policy and communications efforts. Prior to joining DuckDuckGo, Camille advised leading technology companies and venture capital firms and previously held senior communications roles in in government and national political campaigns, including at the U.S. department of State. Joe Jerome serves as Senior Public policy manager at DuckDuckGo, where he works to raise the standard of trust online through legislative and regulatory advocacy. Previously, he was XR Policy Lead at Meta Reality Labs, led legislative advocacy efforts for the center for Democracy and Technology as well as Common Sense Media. He was also policy Counsel at the Future of Privacy Forum and an associate in the Privacy and Cybersecurity practice at Wilmer Hale. I wanted to have the DuckDuckGo policy folks on because they see the world very differently from that of the rest of the digital ad space. Their audience is Perhaps small within DuckDuckGo when compared to other companies who might reach billions of users, but it's also a unique audience that doesn't necessarily have a ton of overlap and with the audience that the ad space is generally trying to reach. Personally, I want to get a better sense of how DuckDuckGo is seeing the role of the browser evolve over time and get their views on privacy, competition and specific to the global privacy control. So let's get to it. Hey guys, thanks for coming on the pod. How are you?
- [02:45]
Joe Jerome
Great, great. Thanks for having us, Alan.
- [02:47]
Camille Bazbaz
Well, I'm really looking forward to this discussion. So just just to start us off so DuckDuckGo began in 2008 as a privacy safe search engine that doesn't track. Now I'm using air quotes around the term track. I mean it's, it's a, it's a term that historically has had multiple definitions. So how does DuckDuckGo define that term and then how does that play into your company's core ethos and like value proposals?
- [03:16]
Joe Jerome
Tracking to us means the ability to connect different parts of your activity online into one profile that can identify you. So what makes DuckDuckGo interesting and different from a privacy side and from a tech side is that we don't collect any user search history. We don't collect any user browsing history in our browser. And, and so every time you search with DuckDuckGo it's like searching for the first time in a way. Of course, you know, we have ways you can save settings and that kind of thing. But the idea is you can search with DuckDuckGo without feeling like, and browse with DuckDuckGo and now of course use AI with DuckDuckGo without feeling like you're being watched, without having that sense of, you know, is my phone listening to me? That sort of creepy feeling you can get online when you see ads following you around or it seems like it's trying to anticipate something. And so yeah, that's how we think about tracking is sort of the, the lack of a user profile. Anything about that, Joe, that you'd want to add from your perspective?
- [04:26]
Unnamed Guest
No, no, no, not at all. I think that's a great answer.
- [04:28]
Camille Bazbaz
And you have a fairly limited number of ad monetization partners and I'm inferring by your answer that you're able to impose a similar ethos on them, at least with respect to the data that, that you're sharing with them.
- [04:42]
Joe Jerome
That's right, that's right. And so you know, our advertisers, you know, we have a strong partnership with Microsoft for advertising to serve completely anonymous ads. So that means that, you know, every time an ad shows up, the advertiser, you know, will get data to save at a showed up, but they won't necessarily get the same granularity that you would get from Google or elsewhere. Meaning you won't know necessarily who saw it. Exactly. But at the same time, you know, you can get clicks and conversions all in a privacy respecting way. And I think, you know, one thing advertisers have found specifically value add is DuckDuckGo is a lot bigger than people think. You know, we're the number three search engine in the U.S. we, you know, we, we just passed 3% market share, which, you know, might not sound like a lot, but is, you know, hundreds of millions of searches a day and billions a month and you know, larger also than perplexity and you know, some of the other up and coming chatbot services. And so you can reach an audience on DuckDuckGo that you really can't necessarily reach everywhere. You know, by some estimates there are at least 7 million people who use DuckDuckGo but don't use Google. And so, you know, if you're an advertiser looking to broaden your reach a little bit and you know, maybe you've done some research that they care about privacy, DuckDuckGo is a, is a great place to advertise.
- [06:16]
Camille Bazbaz
Yeah, that makes sense. And that actually it sounds like there's an entire, I mean, that's 7 million users. It's funny, in almost any pre Internet setting that's a huge audience. And, and it's just, it's just that when you compare it to the billions and billions around the world, it does look a little smaller. But still, it's nothing to sneeze at.
- [06:35]
Joe Jerome
Yeah, and I think, you know, to be clear, we, you can be pro privacy and pro advertising. Advertising doesn't need to take over the entire search result page, as we call it in the, in the industry. For all the nerds out there, you know, it can be two or three or just two links at the top and then the rest can be your organic results. We've tried to keep the ad load as low as possible throughout our existence. One, because I think consumers, our users prefer that and two, then it makes your ads more valuable. And you know, we have a number of different ad products. There are product ads and text ads and you know, we have a shopping vertical. But yeah, I mean, you know, if we had this conversation 10 years ago, you know, we'd probably be talking about the privacy paradox and do people actually care and will something like DuckDuckGo be around for 15 years, that kind of thing. And it's exciting to be here now where, you know, by our estimates we have about 30 million users in the United States. And you know, we don't track our users, so we don't know exactly how many we have. It's always a funny thing when people ask and it's like, well actually, you know, we don't have a login, so you know, it's hard to know exactly. But from all of our estimates and surveys we've done believe we've around 100 million around the world. And so, you know, privacy is here to stay. It's something people really care about. It's going to become, I think it's going to come back into mainstream conversation more around AI and, you know, I think we will have a committed audience that's of a good and impressive size, I think, for, for a long time.
- [08:18]
Camille Bazbaz
So I want to talk a little bit about your browser. And if I've got my numbers correct, you released the browser for mobile in 2018 and then a desktop starting in 2022. And so what was the original goal of the browser? Was that just a distribution play or, you know, what, what were you guys thinking?
- [08:36]
Joe Jerome
Yeah, it's a great question. One is we wanted to extend the privacy that we could give to our users. So we got a lot of feedback from users in those early years that was sort of like, well, I clicked on this link and then I clicked a few times and then on another website, I saw an ad for that website that I was on before I used DuckDuckGo. Why is that happening? I thought it would stop this. And the reason is as just a search engine, as, you know, just a URL, we can't sort of protect the user's privacy as they actually browse the Internet and do more things. So from there our product vision really evolved into how can we add a layer of privacy on top of all the significant things people are doing online. So browsing was a big part of that. And so we had our mobile browser, as you mentioned, and then our desktop browser. You get a dozen additional protections. There's tracker blocking blocks, cookie pop ups. We have a great feature people love called Duck Player, which is a special YouTube player that blocks ads and that blocks targeted ads, I should say, and provides a sort of more sleek viewing experience people really like. And the other reason, as you alluded to, was for distribution purposes, you know, Chrome, as the dominant browser was, has and will continue to be hostile towards other search engines. And the idea that we could grow perpetually on Chrome without that kind of friction was really unlikely. And so we had a better shot at retaining our users and giving more privacy and a better experience by launching our own browser. Our mobile browser has been really successful. You know, as I was saying before, we're number three overall market share, number two on mobile, just behind Google. You know, we've a larger market share than Bing, Yahoo, et cetera. And I believe almost 50% of that is from our browser itself. So we've had a lot of success with that browser. And, you know, part of our goal there is to keep it really lightweight, you know, not to bury any of the privacy settings that people are looking for in settings. Right. So out the box you get an experience that is I think what people expect. When you turn on other modes and you can just sort of open DuckDuckGo. You know, we've had these ideas about having these ads that are sort of like, if you want more privacy, step one, download DuckDuckGo. Step two, you know, there is no step two. That's it. You just have to use it. And so that's kind of the vision, the sort of easy, easy button for privacy.
- [11:30]
Camille Bazbaz
So when you say you're able to block targeted ads, I would just like at a high level, what's the decisioning around that? Is it just that you're able to block the IP address and other unique identifiers so as to make it impossible to place a targeted ad? Or is there something else in there?
- [11:47]
Joe Jerome
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's interesting. Like if you go to, I believe one time recently I went to the Wall Street Journal and I saw some kind of notification that was like, we see you have an ad blocker on, you can have an option to see contextual ads that would not be blocked. And I thought that was kind of interesting because it means that a major publisher was responding to some user preferences about how they want to see advertising. And so the, the way we make that the distinction is, you know, we, we have, we have a crawler that is looking for tracking scripts across the Internet that are trying to collect data from the user in order to participate in this sort of real time bidding process. And, and if we detect that that script is a, is a tracking script and there are third party tracking scripts and all that stuff, then we'll block it.
- [12:44]
Camille Bazbaz
Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, so this may be a really dumb question.
- [12:50]
Joe Jerome
No such thing.
- [12:51]
Camille Bazbaz
I ask a lot of dumb questions, but what is a browser? And like how has that role of a browser changed over the last 10 to 15 years?
- [13:01]
Joe Jerome
Oh boy, I wish that was a super question or a question that doesn't happen all the time. But you know, we have conversations like this where obviously I know that you and your audience understands the difference between a search engine and a browser. But for most people, you know, think about your aunts and uncles, cousins, your parents, they just open their phones and they start using it and they don't necessarily know the difference between any of those things. And you know, I think part of that is because of Google's exclusive deals and their Dominance over the last decade plus where it has become hidden infrastructure in a way. Right. I mean, one of the things we always like to say, or still say, obviously is, you know, most people don't actively choose Google. That decision is made for them by the default settings on, on your phone or on, on your device, on a laptop or desktop, whatever. A lot of people don't understand the difference. The browser is the thing that you use to open websites and browse the web and the search engine website that, that you use to search the web. So, you know, you put a query inside and, and you get results. Of course, now with AI, you know, there's a birth of answer engines and so more and more people are expecting direct answers to their, to their questions on search engines. But you know, browser is really our gateway to the Internet. And that is how most people expect to read news or do shopping. Of course, when you're on your phone, apps can take over a bit more, but you know, on your desktop it's really your gateway. And you know, I think it's important that the browser continues to be the user agent, you know, so really represent the user as they browse the Internet, communicate their preferences, you know, and it'll be interesting to see how the browser evolves over time now.
- [15:07]
Camille Bazbaz
Yeah, because it seems like the, even from, you know, 10 years ago, the role has shifted. Every browser has its unique offering, but we seem to have moved beyond the role of the browser as being solely a user's agent. And there's additional features and functionalities that some people may find useful, but nonetheless it has sort of morphed the role of the browser.
- [15:32]
Joe Jerome
Yeah, totally. And I think, you know, the rise of AI agents is going to do it again. How much of the browsing is going to start to be automated? How much is of it is going to try and think on your behalf to complete tasks? And then how does that change the interface? You know, the idea that an AI agent can sort of run a headless browser in the background without you ever needing to see it. You know, if you want to book tickets to something or book a reservation to dinner or, you know, order food or whatever. The uses are still really important, but it'll be interesting to see to what extent it remains as user facing as it is now. I mean, you know, while I say that, I think we're at this really interesting inflection point where the future seems sort of closer than ever, but it's still hurry up and wait. So what is going to land? What are users going to really Need. What needs are going to be met that cannot be met? Now that becomes an essential part of how we use the Internet, of how we interact with our phones and our computers is still in the process of changing and forming. But it's incredibly interesting to see it peak here and there. And I think it's also important to layer on top of that is, you know, on the, on the Monopoly report is with all this change, you still have dominant players who can leverage their dominance, right? So isn't that the whole thing?
- [17:09]
Camille Bazbaz
It's sort of like, you know, customization can be very valuable, but customization without some level of transparency. And you're into like, you know, I remember the olden days where you would put in a search into a box and you would get a bunch of links and then you could decide if link 1 versus link 4 was the, the direction you wanted to go in. But when all that stuff is smushed together and you're not really able to discern, you know, the UPENN article written on a subject versus the Reddit article written on a subject, you've sort of removed the ability for the user to really understand what the thing it is that they're getting.
- [17:50]
Joe Jerome
That's right. And so, you know, we found it important, you know, we've served three tenants to our AI right now towards our sort of product vision, private, useful and optional. And so if you want to turn off all AI features on DuckDuckGo. And so right now we have a feature called Assist, which will give you an instant answer. It is shorter than AI Overviews, it uses less sources than AI Overviews does while displaying them prominently. And so it'll use two to three max, which we think leads to a better answer, less prone to hallucinate, the less amount of sources and potentially conflicting or different contexts the AI is ingesting. And then now if you want a longer answer, you can press a more button and it'll drop down and kind of expand. But we think it's really important to give people options so that if that's an experience that they prefer, or really, if you want to go back and forth, you can figure out this sort of workflow that works for you. And I say the other AI feature we have is called Duck AI, which works like Claude or ChatGPT, but totally anonymous. If you check out Duck AI, you'll get an option to pick either Claude or ChatGPT. We have models from, we have Llama models, we have Mistral and a few others on there, and it's all anonymous. It's all free. And so if you're interested in trying out chatbots, it's a great place to do it that doesn't require any login, is totally private. And if you are also, you know, sort of saying, I don't want any of this, you can turn all off and never see it again. And you can. Even the sort of easiest way to do that is you can go to no AI and it will automatically disable all the AI features. And so, yeah, I think, I think it's important that in this inflection point and also understanding how users actually use these products that you give them these, these options, you know. And Google, for example, doesn't give you options.
- [20:02]
Camille Bazbaz
Yeah, well, it's in, it's, it's all set up in the default settings. And, and maybe I'm actually not familiar with the AI. In some instances you can, you know, poke through the chrome of the browser and figure out settings, but typically it's. Whatever the default is is how things work. And that's. Well, that's one way how you perpetuate the dominance of a, of a particular search engine is you just make sure you're in the default settings.
- [20:26]
Joe Jerome
That's right. And then I think part of that challenge is if it's in the default settings and it's getting forced to users, you know, what Google does becomes the standard of what a user expects, whether that's actually good for them or not. So part of our challenge is to both provide an experience that since we're not the default anywhere, right. Everyone will have used Google before they have used DuckDuckGo. And so when you come to DuckDuckGo, it has to look and feel familiar enough such that you're like, I know how to use this. This is intuitive. I can get the information I want, but it also has to have, why would I use this instead of Google Now? The core reason for that for most people is privacy. Because, you know, the one thing we do and not collecting your searches or browsing is something that they will never do. You know, that'll never be a mode or anything like that. I mean, you know, interestingly enough, as part of that evidence released in the liability trial, us First Google search liability trial, you know, there were documents where Google was talking about making an incognito mode for search in response to our growth and saying, well, you know, we should, we should think about doing this. They're gaining a lot of ground on us. Cambridge Analytica has people worried. Privacy's the thing. Apple is making a Run at privacy. Privacy is iPhone, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, since they are them and they don't face real pressure because of their monopoly, they were like, well, this would potentially hurt the business too much if people used it and we're not going to do it. But yeah. So, I mean, I think it's interesting how. How this is evolving and changing.
- [22:20]
Camille Bazbaz
Sure, sure. So I want to take the conversation a little bit. This has been great to understand a little bit more about DuckDuckGo for a minute. I'd love to take it. The conversation a little bit more philosophically. So. So maybe you aren't even speaking necessarily for DuckDuckGo, but as three, you know, smart public policy people, like, where do we draw lines around tracking around liberal sharing of profile data? Like, is there a world in which a little is probably okay now? And recognizing that DuckDuckGo has set their bar pretty narrowly there and had reached some success with that, I guess. Where does the line cross? Where, you know, philosophically, you guys are like, oh, my goodness, no, that's. That's too much.
- [23:09]
Joe Jerome
Yeah, it's a. It's an interesting question. And you know, like I was trying to say before, we're not anti advertising. You know, it's an important way for businesses to online to make money. In thinking about this podcast, I was reminded about the Byron Tao book and the excerpt that was published and Wired about how the CIA was. Was. Was using ad tech basically to. To track Putin's people. And they were like, this is better than our stuff because we don't need a warrant. And it's just as precise. And, you know, does that cross the creepy line, the track line? Yeah, I think it does. And there's a lot of stuff happening there. And, you know, that's a really obvious example when you can overlay all this data to create from different sources to create a pretty clear fingerprint. I both use that as an analogy, and I guess that's like a real tracking term to identify and track someone. You know, I think the part about, you know, building our products and about talking about privacy, that is hard and also really interesting for me is that the invasion of privacy is hidden. You don't feel it happening to you necessarily. It is just happening. It sort of rears its head here and there with that ad, you know, with a notification here or there. But the flip of it is also interesting, which is in how we design our products. It's really hard to make people feel protected too. How do you feel tangible benefit when the benefit is in Absence of something that it was a hard time feeling before, you know, so there's, there's a, there's a peace of mind and we've, you know, built in different settings and UI and UX experiences to help people feel more private. You know, we have something on our, on our search result page that, that says always private on it so people understand that they're protected and it feels on. But you know, with, with regards to, you know, thinking philosophically about what it is, I think, you know, with our vision being to raise the standard of trust online, I think this idea that there is a personal profile about you that sits and exists somewhere that you have no idea about, that's sort of logging these things that, that you're doing online and that there are people sort of beating over it, that is the line for us. So really it's making sure that your activity cannot be connected in a way to a individual user and be tracked and identified that way.
- [26:03]
Camille Bazbaz
So I would love to take our collective temperature and really do a gut check on how far apart the three of us might be because I think that's where this stuff gets really interesting. It's very easy for everybody to get into like their particular talking points of the constituency that they represent. And for me, look, I'm an ad tech guy and I would say that the two biggest mistakes made by the ad tech community were number one, we should have moved away from the precise location space and I hope that they do sooner rather than later because that is creating all kinds of real world harms. Particularly just to give you the example, like the Dobbs decision, you know, post Dobbs, precise location is a very dangerous place to play and that's not the only area. And then the second thing that I think AdTech made a mistake in and it's sort of related to Dobbs, but not entirely, is we should have stayed as far away from identifiability as we could and we've sort of over the last, what, 15 years or so inched closer and closer towards identifiability. And I think that changes everything because it reduces your ability to actually engage in data minimization in a way that is meaningful and makes sense. Or data retention, same thing. But let's say, I don't know if this comes off as like a negotiation, but I'm just going to go with it. Like what if those two things were taken off the table? How far apart are the, our respective sides?
- [27:34]
Unnamed Guest
So I think this goes to why I wanted to join DuckDuckGo. I think the universe of advertising and ad tech have become just a confused mishmash. And as someone who was, you know, a longtime privacy advocate, you know, as camille said, like, DuckDuckGo is not opposed to advertising, I'm not opposed to advertising. But I've also existed in a universe where I've been surrounded by an advertising industry that pushes the bounds of what is appropriate advertising, as you just mentioned, and then just tries to, you know, what's that game like, you're constantly hiding the ball. And so as a privacy advocate, we can't ever even agree on what privacy means. What is privacy protective advertising? And at the end of the day, the reason that DuckDuckGo is so appealing to me and why I think it's appealing to other folks is some people just want this easy button to make it all go away. I don't want to have to go to some strange opt out here, something else there. And for a long time, I think that's sort of what the advertising industry viewed as like proper privacy controls. And so I don't think I, I, I, maybe I'll be wrong. I think the three of us are going to be, I think we could have very different definitions of what is appropriate or creepy tracking. And I think that that's true for most people. Like, you could go into a room and ask people, what does privacy mean? You're getting a thousand different definitions. But at the end of the day, like, if I don't like someone or all of this, there should be an easy way to turn it off. And I think that's sort of DuckDuckGo's core value proposition. You use our products, use our stuff, and you don't have to deal with that. So this is my way of almost punting it back to you. Like, what do you, like, you've, you've offered two things you don't think the advertising industry should do. I mean, you know, coming from ad tech, like when I see things like, you know, privacy protective advertising or ethically sourced data, those are distinctions without meaning.
- [29:27]
Camille Bazbaz
So, oh no, we're making those up. Let me just tell you, like the, no, I mean, okay, so ethically stores data, I'm just gonna, like, I don't know who's come up with that, but I'm going to call BS on that right now. That's, I, I don't know what that means. That's a marketing lingo term. And I would say that the ad tech and the data broker world do not do themselves any favors by coming up with just nonsensical terms like that. The challenge with the framework around privacy protective features is that even that has has morphed into a, hey, I'm the big company, I know better, I'm protecting my users from, from all of you horrible little guys. And that very cool. Quickly morphs into something that's anti competitive and debatable whether it's good for privacy. And you don't necessarily have transparency. So if you're an advertiser and you're running through all of these types of systems, you know, your ability to vet the efficacy of your media spend is very limited. And that's by design. And so you're really just in that, in, in that dilemma where you know, great that the reports are telling me that I'm doing a good job, but like, I don't really know that I'm doing a good job.
- [30:40]
Unnamed Guest
I mean, it's just the issue where you, and this is oversimplifying and I apologize in advance but like in a universe where what's that expression, like 50% of ad spend is wasted, you just don't know what kind. Like that's a perpetual challenge that the industry has had and it tried to solve that through all of the features available to track people digitally. And the end result is people still on both sides, buyers and sellers still don't trust each other, consumers are frustrated. And I, and I still don't see what the path forward is for the, for the ad tech industry. And so, you know, I've taken measures into my own hands and, and Now I use DuckDuckGo.
- [31:17]
Camille Bazbaz
And that's a, I think, a fair criticism, I think. And by the way, I would add that privacy may not be the ad tech industry's biggest problem. The biggest problem is that, that despite all of the ability to collect data, we still don't really know and we can't even align on a definition of like what outcomes we're trying to drive with advertising. And so, and some of that is clouded by, you know, big tech. And because they have a large footprint and they're able to claim credit for a whole bunch of activities that one might argue that they are not entitled to claim credit for. But that's only part of it that really, it comes back to the ad tech community needs to like literally sit down and decide what it is that we're really trying to do here. Because we've had 20 years of thousands of companies trying to create incremental benefits to solve tiny little problems. And then over time it's just morphed into where like we don't even know what problems we're trying to solve anymore.
- [32:20]
Joe Jerome
Yeah. And I think the elephant in the room of what you were talking about before with Google, they're able to take, you know, use privacy as almost a sword and a shield for their own anti competitive goals. Right. Well, they're saying, well, you know, it just means only we'll have this data and then you, you have to go through us for, for any kind of the targeting that you're used to. And what I find sad and disappointing about all this stuff is that for example, let's say DuckDuckGo started its own ad tech company that was fully contextual. We would have to compete against an anti competitive or within an anti competitive market. And the incentive for us, like I was saying before with how we have to meet users where they are is to meet advertisers where they are. Right. So it's very hard for an advertiser to get the, let's say the brand benefit of advertising more privately to their users. You know, like they could all make some sort of pledge and maybe you'd be, but you know, that doesn't sort of pass the smell test of something that a user would actually care about. You know, I think a user in general is sort of like I don't love ads or I don't notice them and you know, sometimes they're helpful. I don't think there's so much nuance there. But what I'm getting at is without an industry standard that everyone, including Google is going for, it's a lot easier for this to be erased to the bottom than it is erased to the top.
- [33:56]
Camille Bazbaz
Totally agree. And, and, and that's where I, I end up getting, you know, labeled as a reactionary when I just make a very simple observation. You know, when big tech tells little tech that they need to move away from the UID business while Big Tech is maintaining their UIDs, which in, you know, as often as not is actually linked to real world identities. That is not a recipe for fair competition exactly.
- [34:24]
Joe Jerome
The incentives are misaligned. It's just saying to a smaller player, you know, here, here's, here's another barrier for you to cross. And so yeah, so I, I totally understand that that's a, that's a hard position to be in. And you know, one thing that I find kind of interesting these days is if you're looking forward, you know, the extent to which ads show up in AI is still to be written. And you know, the definition setting again around this stuff is Going to be really interesting. To what extent are you allowed to target an advertisement within, let's say a ChatGPT window based on that chat, based on something that ChatGPT has learned about you as a user and your age and your interest. Because you're going to be telling that chatbot much more personal, private stuff even than you were your search engine. Right? Like the sort of classic example you see in ads, other places or, you know, my rash, my, you know, medical issue or whatever. You know, we're seeing use cases where they, where it's therapists, it's, it's advice you're uploading. You know, imagine you upload your resume to ChatGPT because you're applying for a job. Suddenly ChatGPT knows your entire resume and maybe what you feel insecure about, maybe what you don't, and then could sell you a product based on that really explicitly or sort of implicitly because you feel like you're just chatting with someone. How is that going to be made clear? So I feel like these questions are going to come up again and they're going to come up in a different way and potentially even more acute way. And there's an opportunity for the industry to set a high bar for how this works and sort of not make the same mistakes as last time. Because there will be a Cambridge Analytica in the AI era. There will be a Snowden moment. It just hasn't happened yet. So we're still in the, you know, this is all great and everyone's figuring, I mean, not everyone's saying it's all great, to be clear, but there are multiple backlashes to happen and the privacy one is coming and it's going to, I think the way ad tech factors into it is going to be really interesting to see.
- [37:00]
Camille Bazbaz
No fair point. So I want to shift back to Joe mentioned a couple times, like the easy button concept. And so that kind of brings me to the global privacy control and similar universal opt out tools. And what's DuckDuckGo's philosophy when it comes to the global privacy control? Because that's a wonderful easy button. I mean, you hit it goes on, it turns on or it turns off. Well, how are you guys thinking about that?
- [37:28]
Unnamed Guest
So, I mean, I think it's worth saying that DuckDuckGo was a founding member of the effort to create the global privacy control. So we are supporters of it. I think it identified a real problem that's aligned with this idea that we don't think that people should be forced to have to invoke most of their online privacy rights manually and the way sort of rights to opt out have been sort of operationalized is you got to go to a billion different people. And of course even if you really want to do that, nobody has the time or ability to do that. And so going website by website is, is not, is not realistic and it's, it's also not even just not realistic. It's, it's not fair to people. So you know, we have turned on global privacy control settings on our browsers by default. That shouldn't be a surprise. The browser's a privacy protective browser and the global privacy control is a way to protect browser privacy. I think that GPC and I'd actually sort of be curious, you know, your thoughts on this Alan, but I think it's just a future. It's just the latest manifestation of whether it was, you know, P3P or do not track. We need to have easy technical ways for people to say no. And a lot of I think the industry led solutions really didn't do that effectively. And I think you know, the reality is whether you love or hate GPC and you're not entirely sure if it's about selling or sharing, you know, the fact that it's getting baked into these state privacy laws, you know, companies that are, you know, the California AG just you know, recently had an enforcement action against a company that its opt outs didn't work appropriately. But like getting on board the GPC bandwagon, good for people obviously. But I think it's also good for companies since it just helps us avoid some of the complications and challenges that people have had trying to opt out and trying to figure out what means what, what.
- [39:22]
Camille Bazbaz
Yeah, I, so I, I think that in, in a world where addressability is under attack, where you know, third party cookies may or may not be available in any given browser, you know, six months from now, it's helpful to have a signal that is fairly ubiquitous that consumers can use to, to stop some type of activity. I think where I have a philosophical problem with it is to the extent that that gets used to preference one type of activity over another activity and that's that that was sort of the biggest problem with you know, not to raise do not track. But that was the, you know there are certainly challenges to the indus ad industry solutions. There have also been some challenges to the advocate solutions because it's well, they have not worked and so global privacy control was set up I hopefully to address certainly the failures of do not track. But I'd be curious to get your guys take on some of the state law implementations where they talk about, I don't think they always use the term global privacy control, but there are certain rules around it which is that it can't negatively impact another controller it's supposed to be on by default. There's a couple of other ones, but those are probably the two big ones. Like how are you guys thinking about those types of requirements?
- [40:51]
Unnamed Guest
Look, I think we think about things from the context of what does the user want and your point about whether GPC should be on or off by default. Whenever I follow or dive into the morass that is state privacy legislation, there's a lot of tension about, you know, to what degree should this be an affirmative choice of users. I think our thinking is again, just to reiterate, like we have a privacy browser. We want to offer the most comprehensive suite of privacy tools available, and we're not trying to hide the ball on that. So, you know, when we're seeing efforts like in California to sort of require browsers and operating systems, actually implement gpc, I mean, we think that those are, those are positive developments. And getting GPC to be more comprehensive is maybe not the right word, but just more widespread and it's access to users. You know, I think what's underlying your question, this may be a little bit of a punt, is that, you know, we've got different state lawmakers and regulators and advocates and companies that want GPC to, to mean and do different things in different contexts. And it's not entirely clear what the answer to that is. Except, you know, as, as you guys were discussing earlier, a little bit more standardization and understanding of what's going on. I think that's, that's happening a little bit behind the scenes, but I think there's certainly room to make it more, more universal what GPC means across the board for different folks.
- [42:22]
Camille Bazbaz
And, and we, we may not, I'm fully aware that we may not be fully aligned on exactly where it lands, but I'm, I'm heartened to hear that there's sort of a, a recognition that some of this stuff, hopefully there is some clarity and in the interim, you know, you guys are just trying to offer the best tool that you can and I, I, I respect that.
- [42:43]
Unnamed Guest
Yeah, well, I, you know, look, yeah, state privacy laws, I mean, this is not necessarily the topic of this show, but are a manifestation of what decades of privacy in action at, or even privacy just tech regulation in action at the federal level. So, you know, it's not surprising and you know, you Were mentioning that it's not actually, they're not labeled as GPC in these bills. But like when we, we saw in Colorado a number of different implementations let people exercise their opt out rights. You know, there's a lot of creative ideas out there which I know probably gives both advertisers and you know, a lot of companies regulatory headaches. But that's a, that's a manifestation of our inability to get things done at the federal level. And you know, I think part of, part of that falls back to a lot of, a lot of big players, a lot of major platforms and tech companies of being opposed to that.
- [43:39]
Joe Jerome
I think it also speaks to the inherent practicality that is like a core part of the DuckDuckGo ethos. Right. Like when I've described DuckDuckGo to regular people, quote unquote, you know, they're like private search. This is not a thing. Right. It's you know, like you can't get more privacy online. It's like it's already just by getting on it. And you know, there is a world where some people might just feel that way and there's nothing you could do. But I think, you know, part of us has been, you know, if this was all about a purity test, how can you be 100% everything and totally perfect? We would never get anywhere. And so things like gpc, I think we want it to be a part of its founding because it started to lay a path. It's not going to be perfect and it's not going to be 100% pure and they're going to be issues. But hopefully we can all work together to kind of improve them and not have it be a confusing patchwork or some of these things. But to participate in the process and to be practical and not too dogmatic about everything, of course have things that we will not bend on. But also I think try and think of a third way. How could we get to the same outcome but, but, but do it in a way that respects user identity and sort of stops that kind of tracking we were talking about before.
- [45:06]
Camille Bazbaz
Sure, that makes sense. And let me just throw out an idea. If there were a company in addition to your monetization partner who said look, we are going to rep that we're only doing XYZ with respect to your browser, is that even something that, that you guys are looking at or is on the table? I know that's so open ended, but I mean just conceptually, absolutely.
- [45:28]
Joe Jerome
I mean I think we want to support in particular other companies that are Trying to come up with these other ways, this sort of third way to kind of not necessarily say that there has to be a full trade off between privacy and functionality, that there's a way to do it differently, that can, whether using differential privacy or other methods, that there's a way to do it. And so, yeah, we'd love to find a way to help and support those. Yeah, I think conceptually, absolutely.
- [45:59]
Camille Bazbaz
Well, great. And I know I've kind of kept you guys after school here a little bit, so I've only got one more question for you because I would imagine you guys are following the discussions around the potential divestment of Chrome. Actually, I kind of know that for a fact. Right, but as a browser that's built on Chromium, how are you thinking about how a forced by divestment of Chromium would impact duckduckgo? I mean, is the Linux Foundation a possible landing spot? How are you guys thinking about that?
- [46:27]
Unnamed Guest
So I think the first answer is not, you know, we don't just use Chromium, we have, we build our browser on a number of different sort of platforms. I think it's, it's, it's whatever the preferred platform is. So it's a, it's a suite of privacy tools built on top of a, of a browser.
- [46:44]
Joe Jerome
The native rendering engineering. That's the, that is the proper term.
- [46:48]
Unnamed Guest
So.
- [46:48]
Joe Jerome
Of the platform. Yeah.
- [46:50]
Unnamed Guest
So just to be clear that, you know, it, it's not like I would say our browser is wholly dependent on Chromium. That said that I think there, and this was raised at the remedy trial, there are folks that, you know, I think are concerned about what this means for the future of Chrome. I think it's always important to say that a lot of, a lot of Google's opposition to all of the remedies being proposed, you know, whether they're throwing up privacy, whether they're throwing up intellectual property rights, whether they're throwing up security, whether they're throwing up just the sustainability of Chromium. All of that should be taken with a little bit of a grain of salt. You know, there's a lot of inefficiencies in how Google operates its business. You know, as, as our CEO has said, like browsers are the gateway to the Internet and Chrome is the biggest.
- [47:36]
Joe Jerome
Gateway to the Internet.
- [47:37]
Unnamed Guest
So in a universe where Chrome and Chromium aren't operated by Google, they're still an incredibly. Like there's, there's a giant ecosystem that is there to support and continue Chrome because of its value and I, you know, I guess the, the, the last thing I would just add and you mentioned the Linux Foundation. I mean I think, you know, whether it's another for profit company or a nonprofit enterprise for, for the Chrome browser, all of that makes sense in some respects. I mean there are other organizations have already sort of been calling for that, that Google sort of control over Chrome is a problem. I mean from our perspective it's because they, they use dark patterns and they're just really opposed to getting other search engines on Chrome. But even in Chromium, you know, we, we refer to it as open source and I think sometimes when people think of open source they mean it's sort of anything goes. You've got lots of people collaborating and contributing. But Google has a lot of control over the open source version of Chromium. I mean this is also sort of true of the Android open source project. Like it's open source, sure in terms of some of its licensing deals. But Google has its thumb on the scale in a way that definitely, you know, preferences itself and so weakening that either through a divestiture or you know, whatever sort of behavioral remedies that might be out there all strike to me as good things.
- [48:58]
Joe Jerome
You know, I'll just add that like the world won't collapse if Google doesn't own Chrome, you know, we'll all be okay. And you know, Google using Chrome as a way to extend the search monopoly is absolutely problematic and has inhibited our growth and of other search engines and you know, not having Google in charge and able to self preference I think, I think should help.
- [49:26]
Camille Bazbaz
Yeah. And you know, will be interesting to see if the doj calls Google's bluff in terms of like the world's going to end if you get rid of the divest the Chrome browser. Because by the way if they don't do that, I mean we're going to be back in antitrust court in a couple of years anyway.
- [49:42]
Joe Jerome
We'll find out in August.
- [49:44]
Camille Bazbaz
Yeah, we'll see. Well, we get to the next chapter in August. That's the, that's the fun of all this is that this, this is like waiting for like, I don't know what you guys remember growing up, but like waiting for the next episode of, of Star wars to come out. Like you're all excited about something that happens and then, and then you realize that like the next chapter is two and a half to three years off. So I guess with that we'll, we'll, we'll leave it there. But I really appreciate you guys coming on this has been a great discussion.
- [50:10]
Joe Jerome
Agree. Thank you so much Alan.
- [50:13]
Camille Bazbaz
That was a really thoughtful discussion. I think it was helpful for me to better understand DuckDuckGo's philosophy when it comes to privacy and advertising. In that light, I'm glad I was able to get a sense of their approach to advertising via their partner Microsoft, and it was encouraging to hear that there is some level of openness when it comes to bringing in other ad tech partners, provided that those partners are willing to adhere to the DuckDuckGo privacy ethos in the same way that Microsoft apparently does. I believe that the concept of having a privacy easy button is a really appealing, at least conceptually, but I'll note that easy buttons are much more difficult when applied to real world data flows. So with respect to the global privacy control, I wasn't expecting that. We agree on implementation requirements that are written in a bunch of state privacy laws, particularly when it comes to default settings and not using the setting to unfairly disadvantage other controllers eventually. I hope that there are more rules placed around how the GPC signal gets implemented, as I think it can be a valuable tool to the rest of the digital media world, but it needs to be implemented in an even handed way. So lastly, I'd like to see a world where DuckDuckGo could whitelist additional partners, but I say that knowing that the incentives both for DuckDuckGo and for the ad industry at large are not there yet. But hopefully we can keep talking. Maybe over time a consensus will emerge. If you're enjoying these discussions, I hope you'll leave a comment or a positive rating. Please subscribe to the show@monopolyreportpob.com or on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And thanks for listening.
- [52:03]
Alan Chappelle
Thank you for listening to the marketecture podcast. New episodes come out every Friday and an insightful vendor interview is published each Monday. You can subscribe to our library of hundreds of executive interviews at marketecture tv. You can also sign up for free for our weekly newsletter with my original strategic insights on the week's news at News Market tv. And if you're feeling social, we operate a vibrant Slack community that you can apply to join@adtechgod.com.