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Foreign.
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Welcome to the Monopoly Report. The Monopoly Report is dedicated to chronicling and analyzing the impact of antitrust and other regulations on the global advertising economy. If you are new to the Monopoly Report, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter@monopoly-report.com and you can check out all of the Monopoly report podcasts@monopolyreportpod.com Al I'm Alan Chappelle. This week my guest is Cory Doctorow. Corey is a blogger, activist, journalist and science fiction author who served as the co editor of Boing Boing and worked for a number of years with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He's written a bunch of books, but today we'll mostly be talking about his latest book entitled why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and what to Do About It. I love the term and shittification, both because it just aptly describes much of the digital world today, but also because the term is just so universal. You can use enchitification to describe something to your favorite uncle who isn't super sophisticated when it comes to tech, and he'll know instantly what you mean. Anyone familiar with Corey's work may know that he's been critical of the ad tech space. Also, Corey has a lot of insights and is great at connecting the dots and drawing lines through complex issues. I'm hoping I can get Corey to opine a bit on the ad space generally on the implications of the use of consent in privacy and data protection law. And maybe we can get him to talk to some of the challenges around enforcement of privacy laws. So let's get to it. Hey Corey, thanks for coming on my pod. How are you?
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I'm well, thank you. Thank you for having me on.
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B
So where are you in the book tour right now? Are you still early days?
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I think I'm on city nine of 31.
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B
Oh my goodness.
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Technically early. Although it's been. I've been on the road quite a lot.
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B
Yeah. Is there like a various stages of the tour where it's like you start out super enthusiastic and then gradually it just becomes a little bit, a little bit more challenging?
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I mean obviously there's like the physical toll of just sort of missing meals and sleep and spending a lot of time on airplanes and getting your government genital massage once a day from the TSA and so on. But when the book is doing well, energy follows, you know. And the book, this book sold through four printings in the first three days and it's an international bestseller. And in it just came out in the UK and the day after it launched their whole print run was gone and they had to order a new one. So it's doing really well. And there's lots of stuff I haven't been able to announce yet, but some. Some big sort of annual book prizes that are shortlisting it. And so I'm full of beans. Like it's pretty easy to kind of get out of bed and do the thing every day when that's how it's going.
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B
Right. Well, you know, I was supposed to be at your interview with Lina Khan in Brooklyn. I live in New York. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make it at a childcare issue. But I will say, checking out the video, a lot of energy in the room.
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Yeah, that was a stellar event. That was, I think, the third, second, maybe event of the tour. There were some pre tour events as well. I have a visiting professorship up at Cornell, and so I went up to Ithaca and then came down to Cornell Tech and then did the Brooklyn Book Fair. And my publisher was good enough to shake loose some books a couple of weeks in advance of the publication date for that. But yeah, that event with Lena was a humdinger. And it followed on an event with Rohit Chopra that was very good. And I've got one coming up with Tim Wu. If I could just get Jonathan Kantor in there, I'd have collected the set.
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B
Oh, yeah, you've got the Grand Slam right there.
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And I had. I had David Dyen in LA the other day as well. So. Really collecting the set. Yeah.
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B
So would you mind just to get us kicked off, would you walk my audience through the central premise of the book? Like, what is insidification?
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Sure. Well, to understand that, you have to understand that for more than a quarter of a century, or, sorry, just under a quarter of a century now, I've been an activist with the Electronic Frontier foundation, which is a digital rights group originally focused on making sure that our human rights from the physical world followed us in the digital world, and these days equally focused on making sure that the digital world doesn't lead to the erosion of our human rights in the physical world. And the job of being an activist in those esoteric areas is really about trying to find framing devices and metaphors and similes and parables that raise the salience and urgency of these otherwise very abstract and technical questions that really only gain a sense of immediacy for most people when it's too late, when things are really bad. And you kind of want to get ahead of that and get people engaged before then. And so in Shidification is the latest One of these various ways that I've come up with of talking about these subjects, of how our human rights and our digital rights are intertwined. And it specifically relates to the decay of platforms under conditions of monopoly. And platforms, they're not a bad thing. They're one of the endemic forms of the Internet. You know, a platform is just an intermediary, someone who mediates between different groups of users. And given that most of us would rather not, like, gnaw a web server from a whole log using our own teeth, we're going to need some intermediaries to host our content and, you know, handle denial service attacks and be our name server and handle our email and process our payments and do all those other things that are just part of the utility of getting things from one person to another on the Internet. But under conditions of monopoly, platforms have become quite sclerotic, they become quite greedy, and they've usurped the relationship between the people they're supposed to help out. And so we get this platform decay, what I've been calling insidification, where in stage one, platforms are good to their end users while finding a way to lock those users in. Once it's hard for those users to leave, you move on to stage two. You make things worse for those end users in order to make things better for business customers, and you lock them in. And once those users are locked in those business customers, you withdraw all the value from the system. You leave behind. Sort of the barest kind of homeopathic residue of value that you calculate is needed to keep users locked in and to keep business customers locked to users. And you take everything else for the shareholders and for the investors and for the executives, and that's the pattern. But inshidification also advances a theory about why it's happening that maybe we can get into in a minute. Because that's really the mystery. We didn't invent greed in the mid-2020s. The digital tricks that are used to move all that value around, they've been available to people for as long as platforms have existed. So what is it about this moment that's causing these platforms to kind of shamble on as kind of zombies, with us trapped in their rotting carcasses long after someone should have, you know, double tap them and stuffed them in a shallow grave? And that's really the question that the book concerns itself with, as well as what we do about it.
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Well, it is such a fantastic term because it's one of those. It's great that there's now a defined term to describe a very complex set of variables, but it also works sort of outside of that. I mean, I made a reference like a year and a half ago to maybe a year ago to a group of friends about clear and how, you know, going through the airport clear is exactly one Arby's at ad away from complete and shittification. And everybody started laughing. Now, I'm not normally that funny, but my point being, these weren't policy people I was talking to, and they weren't exclusively digital media nerds like you get the idea just by listening to the term, even if you don't understand all the complexities.
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Yeah. And. And, you know, let me say here for the record that you have my blessing to use in shification as loosely as you want. There are some people who I think are very well meaning, but boy are they wrong, who sort of haunt all the spaces I'm in online, waiting to pounce on people and scold them for using insidification loosely instead of in this precise technical way. And I'm like, folks, you know, the only way this term can maintain its precise technical meaning is if we confine its usage to a group of irrelevant insiders. Right. If you want it to actually, like, have an impact in the world, there's going to be some semantic drift where we're not German speakers. We don't have a language academy. Right. Words mean what they say, what we say they mean. It's great. It's the reason English is such an expressive language. It's a language that isn't afraid of a little semantic drift. So by all means, use it loosely, and then maybe if 10 million normies hear it used loosely, 1 million of them will look up what I mean by it, and that's a million people I never would have reached.
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B
Fantastic. And I'm really glad to hear that I don't have to pay you a quarter every time I use the term.
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Yeah, indeed. That would be a very ironic turn, wouldn't it?
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So I want to. I want to get into some of the details you alluded to just a second ago, and I just share a quick story. So when I was growing up, I remember there was a sandwich shop that had emerged as a slightly more healthy alternative to the McFast food burger joints. Over time, the quality of those sandwiches had degraded to the point where I personally now feel they are absolutely inedible. So help me distinguish what you've coined as insidification from what feels like Corporate America 101, where they're simply just degrading the Value of the product.
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Yeah. So they are closely related. My thesis here really is that there are forces that discipline firms that worsen the quality of their products or that harm their users or their workers or their other stakeholders. And that there are unique forces in tech that are distinct from the forces, or rather in addition to the forces that discipline all firms. So all firms are disciplined by competition. Right. All other things being equal, a company that fears that it'll lose your business will behave itself more. And I don't know which sandwich shop you're thinking of, but we've seen mass consolidation in many sectors. And oftentimes, even if you think you're shopping at a company that's distinct from the one that you, that you used to shop at, they have a common owner. You know, you walk down the grocery aisle and you pick something up and it's either going to say Unilever or Procter and Gamble on the bottom. Those are really like, that's how it goes. And you know, the Internet is obviously five giant websites and filled with screenshots of text from the other four. But like, every dating site you use is one dating site. All the porn sites are one porn site. You know, like half of the Internet is Google, the other half is, is Apple or Microsoft. And as we found out with that Amazon outage recently, like Amazon is kind of woven through everything. So you know that consolidation is everywhere and it affects lots of sectors. You know, I probably don't have to tell you that that consolidation has dominated hotels and auto rental and baby products and saline bags and vitamin C and glass bottles and intermodal and sea freight shipping. And also like professional wrestling, cheerleading, and equestrianism. Right. Like wherever you look, it looks like this. Right. And so certainly tech has, has had the same issues. Likewise, there's another form of discipline that tech shares with other sectors and that's regulation. Regulation is the discipline of governments, while competition is the discipline of markets. And you know, regulators basically become ineffectual when you don't have market competition. Because when firms dwindle to a kind of cartel, it's very easy for them to figure out what they're going to demand of their regulators. And not only that, because they're not, you know, distracted with what Peter Thiel calls wasteful competition. They got a lot of money, you know, they're, they're, they're dividing up the market like the Pope dividing up the new world. You have Google bribing Apple to the tune of 20 plus billion dollars a year, not to make competing search engines. So they're not compet and direct lines of business. They're not eroding one another's margins. And they can both walk away with a very hefty profit and they can mobilize that profit in service of getting what they want. We see that across the board too. Whether that's the petrochemical industry creating cancer alley by capturing the epa, or whether it's the fact that, you know, we haven't had a new Congressional Consumer Privacy act in this country since 1988 when Ronald Reagan banned video store clerks from disclosing your VHS rental habits.
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B
Yeah, that one's still haunting us today.
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Oh, it really is. You know, regulatory capture just follows consolidation like night follows day. And so if you want to discipline firms with governments, you have to also discipline them with markets. One of the things I tell my libertarian friends is even if you think that the only thing the government should do is enforce contracts, they're still going to have to be more powerful than the entities whose contracts they're enforcing. The ref has to be able to boss the players around, otherwise they're going to get chased off the field. And so, you know, the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to tolerate. And we tolerate some very large corporations.
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B
Yeah, what comes to mind is the, the battle between Google and the CMA around the privacy sandbox and third party cookie deprecation. Because what I've been told is that the CMA went back to Google and said, hey, I know you're probably not doing that sandbox thing, but we'd like to renew the commitments. And it landed on Sundar's desk and he said no friggin way. And the CMA backed down. And now the case file is. So if you ever need like a really good example of who's in charge with respect to that process, sure enough far to look.
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And the cma, that's the UK Competition and Markets Authority. And we should note that in January they fired Marcus Bokerenk, who is the long standing head of the cma, who did some very good work there and replaced him with a guy called Doug Gurr, who one of his most recent jobs was running Amazon uk. So you know, you could not ask for an example of regulatory capture as stark as that. And so, you know, this is a problem across many sectors, but it's also present in tech. But tech had other forces that disciplined it and those forces have also been eroded. So one is the uniquely composed tech workforce, which until pretty recently was a very powerful workforce. Despite not being unionized. Right. The union density in tech couldn't be detected with a microscope. But because they were so scarce and because they were so productive, you know, the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that the average tech worker was adding a million dollars a year to their boss's bottom line. Right? So this is why you've got the whimsical campus with the free kombucha and the massages and the surgeon who'll freeze your eggs so you can work through your fertile years. It's not because they like you, right? It's because they want to wring a lot of work out of you, and they don't want you walking across the street and getting a job with a guy over there who would very much like to make the million dollars that you're about to bring to your boss's bottom line. And so we had a lot of tech workers who were what I call Tron pilled. They wanted to fight for the user. A lot of them had a journey into the field that started with having their lives absolutely expanded and improved by access to technology and communities and work and so on. And they wanted to share that benefit. They became evangelists for that benefit. They really wanted to distribute it among people who they saw as in their charge, the users. And so when their bosses said, hey, you need to now initiatify that thing that I convinced you to miss your mother's funeral to ship on time, that sense of moral injury that they felt, it didn't have to stop with them. They didn't have to just swallow it. They could express it and say, go to hell. I'm going across the street and getting another job with a guy there, and there's no one you can hire to replace me. And so tech workers really did exert a lot of discipline on these tech bosses whose impulses are no different from the impulses of anyone else in capitalism, right? To sell things for the highest possible price, to make them at the lowest possible price, to hoard, hoard as much value for the firm. You know, the platonic ideal is the thing that costs infinity dollars, but that you pay your workers $0 to make. And, you know, the problem with that, of course, is that no one's going to buy it, right? And no one's going to work for you. And so you got to take a compromise. And how much you compromise is determined by policy. And so, you know, tech workers, as they lost their power, as supply caught up with demand, as we had a half million tech layoffs and the last three Years in US Tech, they just lost the ability to fight with their bosses. And then the final force that is unique to tech and it's really unique to tech, and it's one of my favorites, is something called interoperability. And interoperability, it's just kind of the idea that like, you can wear anyone's laces and your shoes, you can take any light bulb and put it in a light bulb socket, you can put anyone's gas in your car. But in digital technology, interoperability has this distinct character, because the only kind of computer we know how to make is something that computer scientists call the Turing complete Universal von Neumann machine, which is an engine that can calculate every valid program. Which means that for every ten foot pile of shit some tech boss aspires to installing in your way, there is a nimble coder who can provide you with an 11 foot ladder that will see you scaling it effortlessly.
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Right.
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When they install a program in your printer that won't accept generic ink, someone can make you a program that disables that program and lets you use the generic ink that you want. When they block you from using a third party app store, well, you can unblock it and put the third party app store on your device. When they spy on you, you can install an ad blocker that defends your privacy. And 51% of web users have installed that ad blocker. And it means that as a tech boss, when you contemplate increasing the ad load on a web page, making the ads more invasive, more obnoxious, you have to grapple with the possibility that some fraction of your users will be so teed off by this that they will go and type into a search engine, how do I install an ad blocker? And when they do that, you lose them forever. Because no one goes back to the search engine and types, how do I start seeing ads again? And so the revenue from those users goes to zero forever. But we're at the tail end of 20 years of monotonic expansion of IP law that through various means has made it illegal to do that kind of work, to reverse engineer, to scrape, to make all clients to do all those things that are really part of a long and honorable tradition. They are, as they would say in a George Lucas movie, an elegant weapon from a more civilized age. And that interoperability served us very well, but we've criminalized it. And as a result, if you have a platform that is proprietary, if it's been designed to resist modification, whether or not it is actually capable of resisting modification, whether it's technically capable of resisting it. Even trying has become a felony. So under section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright act, removing or tampering with or weakening what's called an access control is a felony punishable by a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. And so we have, in addition to the web, these things we call apps. An app is just a website skinned in the right kind of IP to make it a crime to defend your privacy while you use it. It's proprietary and so you can't reverse engineer it. You can't install an ad blocker. Go nuts with the number of ads and how invasive they are. And this is why companies are so horny to get you to use their ads and not their websites. You know, there's a company called Chamberlain that makes garage door openers, and it doesn't really matter which kind of garage door opener you have in your garage. It's a Chamberlain. They bought all their competitors, and those garage door openers, they all used to support something called HomeKit, which is just a standard way of sending instructions to home automation systems. Smart light bulbs, garage door openers, you know, all manner of things. Smart speakers, thermostats, whatever. And after Chamberlaina consolidated the sector, they turned off HomeKit support. So now you have to use their app to open your garage door, and they put seven ads on the screen that you have to go to to open your garage door. Right? So it's just like the kind of canonical example of how these different things, you know, monopoly, regulatory failures, IP capture, weak labor force, how they all come together to produce this moment where suddenly you've got to look at 7 ads to open your goddamn garage door.
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B
Well, okay, so let me take a half step back and maybe get at what we just talked about. So what's the biggest problem here? And I fear that the answer is going to be all of them. But is it the lack of a comprehensive privacy law or enforcement of existing privacy laws? Is it the perversion of existing compet it the DMCA? Is it section 230 if we're looking for something to really come after as the focal point upon which everything is built? Is there one?
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A
Well, before I answer that, let me say section 230 does not belong in that list. Section 230, which is a rule that says that platforms are not required to do the capital expenditure to police their user speech because users who violate one another's rights with speech, who, who libel one another, it's between them. It's not The. The hosting platform's business. If that were not there, no one could launch a service except a billionaire, because no one except a billionaire could defend those cases or hire the lawyers and the moderators.
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B
I completely agree. And before Eric Goldman literally reaches through the Internet and smacks me, I just want to say I get off the Section 230 train. When people are talking about generative AI being afforded Section 230 protections, we can.
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A
Talk about that as a separate matter, maybe an extra. Yeah, it's a separate matter, but I'd like to talk about that. But maybe later. I wrote a book about AI over the summer because I got so sick of talking about AI. I was like, I just need to write one thing that comprehensively answers all of the questions called the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI. And it'll be out from my publisher, Forresters and Giroux, next year. So, you know, what I want to say is that that framing, like. Which is the worst thing, I think is like, it implies kind of a theory of change, right? We should. If we can just do one thing, then everything else will follow. Or if we can't solve one of those things, nothing else will be solved. I want to say that as an activist, and this is my outlook when I identify a problem, my immediate project is, what do we do to see that problem off? I like the fact that there are different ways in which firms were disciplined in which that discipline has been eroded, because it tells us that if we have an opportunity to restore any of those forces of discipline, that that will create space by weakening these firms to revitalize the other forms of discipline. Right. Reviving competition would open space for good policy. It would also make it easier for workers to unionize. It would also mean that we could probably reform our IP laws. Right? So all these things work in a kind of cycle or like a mutually set of mutually reinforcing components. You know, Lawrence Lessig, who's one of the great theorists of the Internet, wrote a book at the twilight of the last millennium called Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, where he proposes this framework for how technology works in the world that is bounded by code, which is things that are technologically possible, laws, things that are lawful or unlawful norms, things that are socially acceptable, and markets, things that are profitable. And his point is that they all work together. There's not just one that's important. When things are technologically possible, then you can mandate them or prohibit them, but a law prohibiting or mandating something that isn't possible is kind of an irrelevance. Right. Once things are technologically possible, legal possibilities change too. Once things are profitable. Right. Once there's a constituency that's making money from something, or could, they will lobby for it. So, you know, it'd be much harder to ban cannabis now that there are a bunch of people whose living comes from cannabis and who pay tax on it and who are, you know, above board and aren't, aren't just living in the demi mondo criminality. By the same token, you know, we got marriage equality in part because we got a normative shift that established that it was fair and right for people who love each other to be married. But you know, when they come for Obergefell, the Supreme Court decision that legalized same sex marriage, which absolutely they're going to come for, and that the Supreme Court is going to be very much on top of, there will be a new force defending marriage equality when that case comes before the Supremes. And, and that force is going to be people who make money from gay weddings.
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Right.
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It's going to be, you know, gay divorce lawyers, people who gay bake gay wedding cakes, people who own gay wedding halls. Right. I don't know how big a force they're going to be, but they're going to. But like, the fact that gay marriage is profitable is going to change the legal and normative landscape for this stuff. So by the same token, if we got a privacy law tomorrow, it would basically put a lot of the worst practices that are the most profitable practices of the largest tech companies out to pasture. In the last days of the Biden administration, Rohit Chopra actually banned data brokers. That rule was immediately rescinded by the Trump administration. But had that continued, the whole ad tech sector would have just gone in a completely different direction. We are maybe about to see that happen in the European Union. You know, when the European Union brought in their general data protection regulation about nine years ago, this is their comprehensive privacy law, it had this critical flaw, which is that it is enforced in the country in which the company that is violating it is domiciled. And in the case of American tech giants, that's always Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven and tax havens are always crime havens because you have to keep those companies happy. Right. If they can pretend they're Irish this week, they could pretend to be Maltese next week. And so you can't enforce any laws they don't like, including the general data protection regulation. So all the privacy cases in Europe for the last decade or so went to Ireland. And died there because the Irish privacy regulator is like, you know, basically not getting out of bed most days. And when they do, they sit around in their pajamas eating breakfast cereal and watching cartoons. And the cases just don't go anywhere. So now the eu, with the Digital Markets act, has said, okay, well, we're going to start those privacy cases in the federal court from now on and not in the national courts. And so we might actually see that happen. So, like, that privacy thing, it's a big deal. And here in America, you know, we have this campaign at EFF we call Privacy first, which is trying to point out to people that you care about things and other people care about different things. But when you look closely, what they're all about is privacy. Right? You're worried that Facebook made grampy into a QAnon. Someone else is worried that Instagram made their kid anorexic, or that TikTok is causing all the millennials in their life to quote Osama bin Laden or, you know, that. That, like, there's deep fake porn of you or someone you love, or that, you know, the cops are using location data to round up people at ICE protests or the Gen Jan 6 riots, or that, you know, people are being discriminated against on the. On the basis of their race or other protected categories when they take out a loan or a mortgage or apply for a job or what have you. Those are all privacy problems. Right? And, and, you know, if we were to address the privacy issue, which, when you look at it that way, boy, there's a big constituency we could recruit to address it. We could really start to change the landscape. Right. And, and, and weaken these big giants that are maintaining their monopoly with things like data moats and so on. So I would say that we don't have to break this down into a prioritized list. Instead, what we can do is look at the lay of the land at any given moment and see where the greatest vulnerability is in tech monopolies, flanks, and attack them on that flank. There is no best flank to attack them on. The best flank to attack them is always the weakest flank.
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B
So I think it's actually a little worse in Europe than what you're saying, because I agree with the Irish dpc. There's a lot of tax money going through Ireland, and that's a huge problem because there absolutely is an impact on how things are being enforced. However, in the digital media space, a lot of the enforcement is based on this e Privacy Directive, which actually is, rather than picking supervisory authority of choice you're kind of stuck with the supervisory authority who happens to be in France or in Belgium or in the Netherlands. The challenge there is, or at least the suspicion is that a lot of the supervisory authorities are reluctant to go after individual publishers in their home country. In much the same reason, I think there might be some reluctance for the Irish dpc. So you have this weird thing where like the Privacy Directive, there's a lot of talk about it, it's almost never enforced, and I'm not sure it would be helpful if it were, because I have some concerns and I would really love your reaction. I have concerns about a consent for anything type of approach. In part, I think it creates friction and it creates significantly more friction for smaller businesses than it does for the tech giants who, you know, can get people to consent to just about anything. And it creates monetization challenges for the publishers. And I would love your reaction to that. I mean, am I full of hot air here?
- [28:50]
A
Well, you know, I've encountered like, Let me give you the extreme version of this argument, right? Which is there's a, there's a British Marketing association that pops up like a bad smell every time there's any kind of discussion about this. And they're like, you know, the real problem with Monopoly and ad tech is that Google and Facebook, because they have so much data, can do this thing called attribution. So after they show you an ad, they follow you around physically and digitally and look at all of your expenditures and check whether you buy the thing you saw the ad for. And this is an advantage because advertisers really want attribution. You could understand why they would. Right? And you can't get it unless you have one of these big comprehensive surveillance systems. And so the Advertising Industry association says what we need is for the British government to assign every Briton a permanent advertising tracking identifier at birth so that we can level the playing field. Right. We can have like democratized competition and human rights abuses at scale. Right. And I, I, that's like, so that's kind of the extreme version, when you put it that way. It's very obvious. So let me tell you, I, I, I'm one of the co owners and for 19 years I was one of the co editors of a website called Boing Boing. It was one of the very big successful blogs on the Internet. And we had, you know, 9 million readers a month. And we at the start, you know, we weren't doing programmatic advertising. We had an ad sales force. And I think they still do To a certain extent, I'm not really involved in the business anymore. But you know, our ad salesforce would go out and they get these advertisers who'd come in. First of all, the advertisers thought they died and gone to heaven because we told them that they could place ads based on the content of an article. And they're like, really? Like, I don't just have to buy page three and hope that the article next to it is not about, like someone who's been dismembered by a serial killer. Like, I can only run ads against things relevant to my product. You were right about shoes and I can buy an ad next to it. Holy moly. Like, I am the Louis Pasteur of advertising. We have come to the promised land, right? So they were really excited about that. But what they really wanted more than anything was pop up ads. And not the wimpy denatured pop up ad that we see today, right? I'm not talking about a CSS rectangle drawn inside the window. I'm talking about a whole fucking browser window that would spawn and then maybe shrink down to one pixel square and run away from your cursor when you chased it with the mouse and autoplay audio, right? And we would say to them, hey, you know, our users don't like these. And they would say, yeah, huh, that sounds like a you problem because we're the ones with the money, right? And then we went to them and they were like, and there is like no universe in which we are going to buy anything except a pop up ad. Like, you must be crazy if you think we're going to buy anything except a pop up ad. Users can't ignore the pop up ad. They can ignore an ad on their screen that scrolls down. They can't ignore the pop up ad. We're going to show them pop up ads. It's that or nothing. And then one day, two browsers, Opera and Mozilla, the precursor to Firefox, started shipping browsers with pop ups on by default. We had a very techy user base. They installed those browsers, installed them right away. We showed the advertisers our server logs and we said, you know, we'll show the pop up ads. You're the boss, right? But like 99% of our users aren't going to see them and they're like, oh yeah, no, we'll just show a different kind of ad, that's fine, right? So right now you have this, this thought. Oh, well, our path to monetization is through surveillance advertising. And there is no way publishers could thrive if they didn't have surveillance advertising. And how would they locate their audience and sell their products and blah blah, blah, blah, blah, right? Meanwhile, like 10 seconds ago in the history of advertising, content based advertising was the promised land. And now it's like such an also ran like, oh, we'll just place your ads based on the content of the article instead of things we've inferred about the user. They're like, oh, why would we ever get that? I promise you. Right? They say they want best brandy, but they'll settle for small beer. Right? If the only thing on the market is context ads, they will be very happy to have context ads.
- [32:58]
B
Except Boing. Boing is not competing with some other blog. Buying. Buying is competing for advertisers with Facebook and with Google.
- [33:07]
A
That's why it needs to be a law that bans it everywhere.
- [33:09]
B
So no, fair enough. And I, so I've had Tobias Juden on the pod. He's the representative from the adults in IT and the Norway's data Protection authority. And he, he just kind of let it. Let me share that Norway is considering a ban of behavioral advertising. And from my perspective, great. I honestly hope they do that now. I hope that there's some protection for publishers weaved in there while they run that test. But from my perspective, I would like to see what would happen if, you know, I don't know, in one place you ban behavioral advertising altogether. In another place you try something where like purpose limitation and retention and data minimization were, you know, ruled the roost. And I could see you're frowning and you do not like that idea.
- [33:53]
A
I don't like it. You know why? It's not administrable. Right. The only way to find out whether there is purpose limitation, whether there is data minimization is to do like periodic colonoscopies on the servers of giant companies whose infrastructure is purpose built and understood by no one except their own engineers. Right? Like you need a compliance regime that is within the realm of a regulator and a flat prohibition on behavioral ads gets you there. The other thing that we have to remember is that we can get around some of the wheezes that companies use, like essential purpose or wearing you down with dark patterns, which is kind of this grandiose term for just tricking people or these really penny any frauds. It's like, no, it's a dark pattern. I'm a wizard, right? Like it's not a dark pattern.
- [34:43]
B
You move the eyeballs that Was, that was like Alina Khan and, and I.
- [34:49]
A
Know, but it came, it came out of these UX people. Yeah, right. Who are like, you know, oh, like look at, look at what I've done. I've, I've invented this incredible like where Rasputin and Mesmer failed, I have succeeded. I can bypass your critical faculties. Like, dude, you took the buy box and you swapped it with a cancel box. And so people who think they're canceling or buying, right. This does not make you a wizard, right. Like, it just makes you like someone doing the cup and balls with fast hands. Right? Computers have got faster hands than like people do. Right. It's just, it's a simple, crude trick. It's just done quickly. Right. So that's the, you know, anyway, I don't like the term dark pattern, but you know, like Governor Newsom just signed this bill that allows you to programmatically signal that you want to opt out of behavioral advertising. Right. And like that's the real problem. That's what Google does. They just hit you over and over again with the like, are you really sure? Like how sure are you? Like, I think maybe you're not as sure as you thought you were, right? And eventually like they swap the cancel in the okay button enough times that you just like you fat finger it and you, you end up like opting into tracking and then they never show you the are you sure you still want to be tracked dialogue. Right? The are you sure you don't want to be track dialog you have to click 100 times a day. But the like, would you like to continue to be spied on from asshole to appetite button does not exist. Right. And so, and so like I, you know, if you just like if the browser out of the box, the way it comes with a pop up locker comes with the don't spy on me signal and then companies are required to respond to it. You're not going to get that, that differential where like Google and Facebook know everything about you and no one else can find anything else about you.
- [36:31]
B
Well, and to that point I'm actually supportive of. I like that idea. And just as somebody who's of the ad space, I am wildly uncomfortable with the fact that we don't even have a viable ch choice mechanism. A lot of them are based in cookies or they're based in maids and they're based in data points that, that just don't persist. So to have something that does persist to me is really intriguing. The thing that I would like to see and A couple of the states have done this. I think Connecticut has, has maybe two or three others, some anti preferencing measures so that Apple and Google or even Brave can't use that signal as a way to preference their own advertising products. Sure, if we get that, I think then, then I think we've made the world well an inch better.
- [37:16]
A
And look, if you're the news media, the thing that's being stolen from you is not like you know, links to your website or discussion forums, right? Like news you're not allowed to talk about or discover is not news, it's a secret. But like the stuff that is stolen from you is just money and it's, and the reason they're stealing money from you is because they have a monopoly. So historically intermediaries in advertising, right, the agencies and the buyers and so on were like 15% of the total turnover in the sector and now it's 51%. It's all Google and Meta, right? So they've just like got a 300% increase. You know as well as I do how, you know you have these firms that own the buy side platform, the sell side platform, the marketplace and that compete with buyers and sellers and that are taking like again like, like 51% out of the marketplace there, right? This is like going to court to divorce your partner and you find out you're both being represented by the same lawyer who's also the judge and also trying to match with both of you on Tinder. And then after they gavel it down they're like well I figured out who gets the house. It's not you and it's not you, it's me. Right? It's like it's not a mystery like how we end up in that situation like that is like a completely comprehensible dynamic. It doesn't require a lot of deep investigation to figure out how the money disappears there. $0.30 out of every subscriber dollar disappearing into either Google or Apple's pocket through the app tax, right? The fact that if you have subscribers on social media, your posts won't be shown to them even though they ask to see them unless you pay to boost them, right? Like these are all measures where states want to intervene to protect publishers. These are things that put money into publishers pockets and unlike things like link taxes and so on, do not make publishers who we hope are going to be watchdogging these tech platforms into business partners with the, with the platforms. You know when, when, when Canada, I'm like all the best Americans, I am Canadian When Canada brought in its, its link tax, the Tor Star, you know, which is the owns the Toronto Star, they dropped their long running investigator series defanging big tech and became business partners with Google. Now maybe that was a coincidence, but it's a hell of a coincidence and they certainly haven't revived it since. So, you know, I think like, just like it's impossible to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it, it's impossible to get a editorial board to approve investigative journalism when their dividend depends on them not investigating that stuff too, too heavily. So I just think that like having been a publisher, having worked in advertising, I was an ad copywriter a million years ago. I think that advertisers are pretty creative, they can figure out how to do this stuff and that we do not need to sacrifice privacy to have an ad market. Like we had advertising for a zillion years before we had surveillance.
- [40:06]
B
Yeah. And there's too many opacities in the whole supply chain there. And it's actually, if anything, getting worse. I mean, there's been at least a little bit of pushback now around this whole like privacy enhancing technologies. And yes, if you're not watching this, I'm using air quotes because there's a trade off there. If the advertiser has no idea what's happened with their ad, except for the fact that you're telling them that their ad was a. Okay and, and generated a whole bunch of, you know, great impressions or whatever, like that's not a great outcome either. I mean, you need to be able to rate the efficacy of your media spend on some level. I wish advertisers could figure out how to do that by zip code. There's really smart people. I know that, like, I wish I could get somebody to give them like four or five million dollars to like really figure this out and pressure test it. But that's a different story for a different day, I guess. So I want to talk a bit about enforcement, particularly in the US like, you know, I'm going to agree that everybody, including the cppa, but I mean they're like as well funded as just about anybody out there right now. But they're all generally underfunded. But what do you make of some of the class action litigation? I'm skeptical that private right of action is the way to go. And I'm basing that on what I'm seeing with, you know, class action litigants coming after the VPPA, the 1980s law and SEPA, a 1960s wiretap law and causing all kinds of harm, which by the way is disproportionately hurting smaller businesses. So like, I guess that's a long winded way of saying, like, where does the right balance struck?
- [41:36]
A
I'm a great believer in the private right of action, and in part that's because I work for an impact litigation shop. Right. And what we do is step in. Often where enforcers are unwilling to step in. We are looking for people who have been harmed by firms or sometimes by governments, or sometimes by governments and working with firms. We sued Doge and Elon Musk on behalf of federal workers, for example, most recently. And if all you have is public enforcers as a way of stepping into correct harms, then what you're going to end up with is regulatory capture. Right? And when you look at something like the Americans with Disabilities act, there are spurious cases that are brought under ada. But ADA broadly has created an equilibrium where when you say to your contractor, all right, we're going to, you know, fix the restaurant up. And the contractor says, right, we're going to have to make this door 3 inches wider while we're doing that. And you say, no, just let people in wheelchairs sit outside my restaurant. And we won't let them in. You know, they'll have to transfer and be carried in or whatever. They won't be able to use the toilet while they're here. Your contractor just says, like, yeah, you know how much you're going to get sued for if you do that? Like it's a couple hundred bucks extra. Just do it. Right. We have got pretty good ADA compliance in this country because of the no win, no fee bar and the private right of action. You know, if we're worried about spurious cases, that's what, like early motions to dismiss and anti slap motions and fee shifting. That's what that stuff is for, right?
- [43:14]
B
Harder to do. And I'm just telling you, you still end up, you still end up down a quarter of a million dollars, which for Google is like, they could just go around the office and get that.
- [43:23]
A
Not with anti slap. I got, I got sued by, you know, at Boing Boing. We got sued by all kinds of people. We got sued by Ralph Lauren. We got sued by a guy who made a crummy thing that let you make phone calls through your computer called MagicJack. We got, we got sup. All kinds of people, you know. Yeah, it was like tens of thousands of dollars. Then we did a total fee shift. I got threatened not long ago by this billionaire fintech guy. And a friend of mine who's a first amendment lawyer, Ken White, sent him a note where it was like, hey, I've reviewed your spurious threat to my client. I've also looked at your balance sheet, and I'd like to remind you that California has fee shifting under its anti slap law. And here's how much my paralegals cost.
- [44:08]
B
Right.
- [44:10]
A
I can just have those guys spend the next 2,000 hours figuring out, like, before even I show up for work, figuring out what I'm going to do on the job. So by all means, try this spurious legal claim against my client for saying that your bullshit credit card where you say you plant a tree for every $10 that your people spend, but you haven't planted any trees and you just, like, are greenwashing your dumb fintech startup. By all means, go ahead and bring the suit against my client. I relish the opportunity to put a new wing on my house. Right, so that's what anti slap gets you.
- [44:48]
B
Okay, so I think I actually agree with you regarding pride of right of action. When there's a tangible harm and some of the things you cited, like chasing somebody because they happen to go to an abortion clinic and then arresting them. Absolutely. Stalking people. And you're seeing more and more examples of even the use of not just precise location, but even some public data to stock public figures. Absolutely. I start to get a little skeptical with you. Like, you placed a single cookie on my desktop and therefore you need to, you know, fork over, you know, half a million dollars.
- [45:20]
A
Yeah, but you. But it's not that. Right? It's. You collected data that is eventually going to breach. Right. We can't predict the harms in advance. Right. Like, so, you know, the NHS says, okay, well, we're going to do an anonymized data set release where we're going prescribing data for hospitals with numeric identifiers in place of the names of the patients so that we can have a big data set that researchers can use to correlate, you know, prescribing patterns and health outcomes and so on. And then like, someone leaks a database of taxi rides and suddenly you can see who went to the hospital the days the prescriptions were written, and you can see where they left from. And now, you know, who got which prescriptions and who's getting. But now hormone therapy and so on.
- [45:59]
B
But now we're in a tangible harm. And I'm with you.
- [46:01]
A
No, because you want to punish people before they collect the data. Data that you don't, data that you collect will might leak. Data that you retain will leak. It's like saying, oh well, all I did was warehouse the plutonium in my basement. It didn't leak yet.
- [46:14]
B
Okay, but I'm talking about like a, a retailer who sells stationary paper and is just happens to feel like they need to link to, to meta because otherwise their ad spend, you know, goes up like by 20%. And like I, I just don't know that's the same stuff you're talking about.
- [46:32]
A
Well, but you know, now we've got things like if you know when someone's coming into the stationary shop or you know what IP address they're visiting you from, now you're tracking their motion as well. And so they're, you know, you, you are creating this unquantifiable downstream risk and it's not being taken seriously. So I think that the only reason this seems normal is because we do live in this privacy vacuum where we haven't had any privacy law since the 80s. If we'd had privacy law, this norm wouldn't have existed of gathering data willy nilly. I don't think that the small incremental benefits of collecting data outweigh the cumulative risks of these large scale breaches. And we're starting to see those risks catch up with us now. Like, you know, the ransomware epidemic is also a spear phishing epidemic. And spear phishing is downstream from breach data. Right? That's like, that's how they are. Like, hey, this is, you know, I got spear phished for by someone who knew which credit union I banked at, which is like a one branch credit union probably because there was a Zelle leak and they were able to call me up, spoof the phone number of my bank, show that they were calling from them. It's a one branch credit union. This is a great thing to do for fraud with credit unions because they all outsource their after hours anti fraud. And so if you call someone, it was New Year's Day. If you call someone on a holiday and say, hey, I'm your credit union's outsourced thing and you've got the number and you know which credit card union they're at, it's a very convincing pitch. And that's because someone collected that data and breached it. Right When I was testifying with Rohit Chopra in front of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau on the rule banning data brokers, you know, the person who came before me was someone from the DoD testifying about the fact that you can do an ad buy that targets people on military bases with gambling problems. And the person who came after me was someone from the AARP testifying that you can target people who are seniors in cognitive decline. Right. That's like a demographic category you can target. Right? And all that stuff is like downstream of just unrestricted data collection. And I understand that no one wants to have this tripwire where you install a standard piece of software and then because it comes configured by default in a way that exposes you to liability, you get, you know, swept up by some no win, no fee scumbag who's like casting a wide net and hoping to extract a settlement from you. But the answer to that is to like, have the software, like not expose you to liability by default. It's only because the software ships in the riskiest, most promiscuous data gatherings state possible that there is this risk. And you know, like, one of the very tenuous blessings of Monopoly is that there's so few software vendors out there providing this software that we really only have to get half a dozen of them to stop, you know, supplying people who are just trying to sell dry cleaning services or whatever with software that by default out of the box violates people's privacy in dangerous ways. And then that ceases to become a problem. And this is one of those areas where like insurers can carry a lot of weight. You know, this is the kind of thing where your insurer says to you as a dry cleaner when they're writing your, you know, policy or your, you know, your commercial liability policy, like, which point of sale software are you using? Oh, how do they comply with ccpa? I'm not writing you a policy. You need a different vendor, right? And then like 10 seconds later, all the vendors have cleaned up their act.
- [50:02]
B
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I think that, that, and you certainly give me some things to think about. I, I, I only have two more questions for you. This has been a just a fantastic discussion. I'm curious if you have a different view around the momentum of antitrust law in the US Because I, I note that you were finishing up your book like over the summer and at that time there was still, well, I'll just say how I feel. There was some enthusiasm around the momentum created by the Khan cancer era and then you saw the Google search decision. So from my side of the room, a lot of that is dissipated. I'm not nearly as optimistic. I'm just curious, what's your view right now?
- [50:42]
A
So where my enthusiasm has shifted is away from hope that Trump will do antitrust. He will. But, you know, if you think of the Biden administration as creating like a, a list of the corporations that violate antitrust law sorted by the people who harm the American public at the top, Trump has done that, but he sorted it by the, you know, corporations that anger him most at the top. And he's going to extract settlements from him, or they're going to, like, give a million dollars to a MAGA podcaster who's going to, you know, hang around the fifth floor of the DOJ building where the antitrust division is, and get them off the hook.
- [51:16]
B
And I got to become a MAGA podcaster is really what you're.
- [51:18]
A
Yeah, that's your, that's your. You're losing your opportunity here. I just finished the new Carl Hiasson novel. He's, you know, he writes these crime mysteries, the crime comedic crime novels, and it's a, it's a MAGA crime novel. And there's a bumbling MAGA congressman whose cause celeb that he's taken up is a conspiracy theory that woke billiards manufacturers are going to replace the black eight ball with a rainbow eight ball. It's like. And like, he's, like, getting on the podcast circuit. It's like the most perfect little microcosm of, like, MAGA podcasting. But, but the thing that does actually excite me rather a lot. So I, as I said, I've worked for the Electronic Frontier foundation most of my adult life, and I was for many years the European Director. I worked in 30 countries, more than 30 countries. And everywhere I went, we talk about what would be a good tech policy, like the ability to reverse engineer and modify things, better privacy laws and so on. And whenever I spoke to policymakers, they would say, well, yeah, but if we did that, the US Would hit us with tariffs. The reason we have these crummy laws is the US Threatened us with tariffs. Well, you're like, you know, if someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do what they tell you, and then you do it, and then they burn your house down, you don't have to keep doing what they told you. And, you know, given how aggressive Trump has been in, first of all, characterizing America's trading partners as adversaries that he intends to conquer commercially and sometimes militarily. Right. I mean, you know, the reason Canada did not get a Conservative PM in the last election was all that 51st state nonsense. Just Canadians went berserk when they heard it. But also tech companies based in America are going to be used as an arm of the American state. Right? When the International Criminal Court's chief prosecutor loses his Outlook account and all of his contacts and all of his calendars and all of his working files and all of his email archives because Trump has been complaining about him swearing out a criminal complaint against Benjamin Netanyahu. Right? Like that is a signal to every world leader, every policymaker that you must not be on American tech platforms anymore. That they are going to. It's going to be. The regime from now on is going to be either you roll over or they'll cut you off at the knees, right? And this is really accelerating things in the same way that like Putin's invasion of Ukraine accelerated the solarization of Europe. They're like 10 years ahead of their zero emissions goals now because musk needs when the devil drives. This is happening now with tech Policy Eurostack, this big initiative to replicate American tech companies. It's about to hit a wall because they have not thought through how people will migrate from one to the other. They're like, okay, well we'll build a thing that's exactly like Office 365 or G docs, and then what, right? You manually copy and paste a million documents over, right? Like, no one is going to do that. And look, if Apple will not open up their app store in Europe and raises like 20 spurious legal objections and threatens to leave the country and does malicious compliance, they're certainly not going to give you the easy one click tool to migrate your data off their cloud and onto a European cloud. And so we're going to have to use reverse engineering. We're going to have to have headless PCs running iPhone emulators that pretend to be you and scrape your data. We're going to have to have other kinds of scrapers, all clients, all that stuff. And to get there, we're going to have to abolish Article 6 of the Copyright Directive, the equivalent of the DMCA. And so, you know, right now we have like the European Union acting like, well, meaning West Germans building housing for East Germans in West Berlin. But they haven't thought about how they're going to get them over the wall, right? And the next step is going to be knocking down the wall. You know, when life gives you sars, you make sarsaparilla. Like, we are like, in this, like, circumstance that I wouldn't have wished on anyone. But, like the only thing worse than living under this kind of terrifying moment of Trumpism, would be to not salvage this geopolitical dividend that he's produced for us. You know, as someone who's been adverse to the US Trade Representative for 25 years and has watched with grudging admiration as they whipped the entire world into a policy framework that parochially benefited American tech companies at the expense of tech companies all over the world. And also the people all over the world watching Donald Trump like, like, hamstring the US Trade rep and just do, like, an unscheduled rapid midair disassembly of the international system of trade that was so beneficial to America. It's actually quite amazing to watch. I'm kind of excited about it. So I don't have a lot of hope for the US Right now, but I do think that, like, you know, if Canada gets into the business of, you know, jailbreaking phones and printers and cars and ventilators and tractors and making alternative firmware for them and ad blockers and privacy blockers, all this other stuff for them, that Americans are going to be able to buy them.
- [56:03]
B
Right?
- [56:04]
A
Anyone with a payment method and an Internet connection is going to be able to lay hands on this. And so, yeah, today we source the reasonably priced pharmaceuticals that our government won't reign in from our Canadian neighbors, but tomorrow it might be the tools of technological liberation. And if it's not Canada, it might be Mexico. If it's not Mexico, it might be the eu. And if it's not you, it might be, like, Ghana, because there are so many places in the world that could be providing these services, you know?
- [56:30]
B
All right, so you pointed to a silver lining. What's the solution to this? Like, what. What needs to happen in order for inchitification to be defeated? There's probably a better way to say that. Go with that.
- [56:41]
A
I think the answer is in that same kind of coalition building that I was talking about when I talked about the Privacy first campaign, that you have to have people join the dots between the harms that they experience from consolidated tech and the harms that they experience from consolidated power all across the board. And that includes things like electoral harms and ineffectual regulators and all of the things that arise from that, and privacy, but also xenophobia and the inaction on the climate and so on. These are all downstream of the inability to make good policy when. When very rich people don't want that good policy to be made and when they're just so scorchingly rich that there's no hope of using public power to counter them. My Friend James Boyle. I quote him in the book. He talks about how before the word ecology entered our lexicon, people didn't know that they were on the same side. It wasn't clear that if you cared about owls and I cared about the ozone layer, we cared about the same thing. That the destiny of nocturnal avians is not. Not readily connectable to the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere, but that the term ecology can weld these different ideas together into a movement, into a coherent force. I think that defeating inshidification, the shortest path to it, is building out that much broader base. Not people who all come to work on inshidification, but people who march side by side. Just like my issue might be the ozone laer and your issue might be owls, but when you need a hand, I'll lend it to you because we're both ecologists. Maybe you're working on labor issues, maybe you're working on privacy, maybe you're working on antitrust, maybe you're working on other really important issues. But we'll have each other's back because we'll understand that we're working on the same thing. We're working on solidarity and pluralism.
- [58:30]
B
I feel like I've been waiting for some flavor of that coalition to emerge within the US 50 years and we seem to have regressed. But here's hoping.
- [58:41]
A
I agree. I mean, look down east in Canada. There's a joke whose punchline is if you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here. The fact that we don't know how we get there in America doesn't mean that that isn't the place that we need to go. And the thing that gives me hope right now, in addition to what Trump is doing and how it opens up policy space abroad, is that the surge in antitrust action runs counter to all political science commonplaces. The big empirical studies on political outcomes say that when billionaires don't want something, it really doesn't matter how much the rest of us want it, it just won't happen. But antitrust is the exception. And I can't overstate how profoundly weird this is in the context of political science orthodoxy. This is like gravity reversing itself, water flowing uphill, pigs flying. And it is a pocket miracle. And I think think many of us have just not clocked because it's so weird and esoteric. We have not clocked how strange it is that a movement that strikes right at the heart of billionaires power, the ability to consolidate and capture markets, that this has caught fire in the US but also in Canada. Our Competition Bureau, after years of being comically ineffectual, challenging three mergers in its whole history, but in succeeding never, is now in possession of some of the most muscular powers that any competition regulator in the world has ever had. And a huge budget, thanks to Justin Trudeau, who's historically been pretty deferential to corporate power, whipping his caucus to pass a bill in 2024. You mentioned the Competition and Markets Authority. We have the European Union, the Digital Markets act, the Digital Services Act, Australia, South Korea, Singapore, Japan, but also China. Right. The Cyberspace Directive. Like these, these really big global movements that I don't think anyone has a good explanation for. You know, no one can explain why it is that China and Australia and Canada and the US and the EU all discovered antitrust religion about seven years ago. Right. I don't know why it is a big tailwind and like we should be letting out all the sales.
- [60:56]
B
Well, I think part of the challenge here is people thought we were on the, you know, on the goal line and we were probably closer to the 30 yard line. And the reality is that we have.
- [61:05]
A
To keep pushing one step forward, three steps back. But, you know, Trump thinks that like, you fire the referees that, that the game ends. But what he doesn't realize is when you fire the referees, you throw out the rule book. And I think that there's going to be a lot of people on the labor side and in other places who are going to be playing the ball that, that move.
- [61:25]
B
Well, Corey, this has been an absolutely fantastic discussion. I really appreciate you coming on. Everybody buy and shitification if you're in the ad space. This is a book that you really need to read.
- [61:35]
A
All right, thank you, Corey.
- [61:36]
B
Thank you so much. That was a great conversation. A few thoughts. First, the whole premise behind the Monopoly Report is to bring on a wide variety of opinions to discuss the inherent problems within digital media. And that includes the opinions of those who view the world differently than me. I'm worried that too many of us get into our comfortable little filter bubbles of perception, but the risk of operating that way is that we just don't make any progress towards solutions and we don't learn anything new. I'm grateful that Corey was willing to speak with me and I hope we all learned something. I certainly did. Second, coming at this, as a songwriter, I'm kind of obsessed with the term agitification as it almost has the feel of a Bob Dylan quip designed to like, encapsulate what's happening simultaneously to an entire generation. Corey and I talked a bit about the legal causes around inshidification, and there's no shortage of blame to go around, whether it's a lack of comprehensive privacy law or the peculiarities of EU data protection law, or the fact that antitrust law seems more designed to protect monopolists than people, or even copyright law, which seems to be wilting under the pressure to move forward at light speed on AI in the digital media market, I still think competition and antitrust are the linchpin of insidification. Third, I recognize that Corey and I are on different sides when it comes to tracking and targeting. He noted that data minimization is really difficult to administer and enforce as a standard, which of course makes sense. And I think that Corey is right that, well, at least years ago publishers used to be just fine with contextual ads, but I'm not so sure that contextual alone is enough today for publishers to keep the lights on, certainly when compared to targeting techniques of large online platforms. So maybe Norway, who seeks to ban behavioral ads, and perhaps some other places, will start to experiment with different approaches to publisher monetization and after we can all have an honest discussion when it comes to the results and the implications for the future. And I appreciate Corey's point that it's difficult to quantify the impact of what happens to a data set after it's been collected. But I'll also note that it's not exactly a straight line from placing a cookie when someone visits a website of a stationary store to jacking up insurance rates, because if you inferred that person has cancer, in other words, I think there's a way to address the harm without literally prohibiting all types of data collection online. Corey and I are also on different sides when it comes to offering a private right of action as part of enforcement under privacy laws in response to Corey's claim that what's called anti slap laws could work to limit class action enforcement. Well, I'll note that I was unable to find a single instance of anti SLAP being used in connection with the Video Privacy Protection act or even a SEPA defense. So I'd be curious to know if Corey's view on the private right of action might be different if he knew that anti SLAPP were not available. And if you're wondering what Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation or SLAP is, I did a write up on my substack and linked to it in the show notes so you can check it out there. Finally, Corey talks about the creation of a movement of building a coalition around many of the endemic issues he raises and the hopes that this coalition might grow to be large enough and powerful enough to push back. I can only hope he's right. But as I said on the pod, lots of us have been waiting for that coalition to emerge for most of our adult lives. If anyone has actionable steps on how to bring that coalition together, I would love to chat with you. We have a bunch of other fantastic guests coming up on the Monopoly Report podcast over the next few weeks. Please subscribe to the show@monopolyreportpod.com or on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And thanks for listening.