To a certain extent this behavior is nothing new. The 12 CD's for a penny scams I fell pray to as a child come to mind. The people who think like that have just moved online.
One thing I don't see getting much attention here is the section on regulation and the lack of interest by tech companies who provide the platforms for people like this to exploit on.
Quoting part of the article, "... the tech companies that carry those ads tend to throw up their hands an declaim that the web is so huge that no one could hope to monitor it all."
This section of the article, where Edelman is quoted several times, stood out to me. It made me a little more sympathetic to regulation. In that, if there is no incentive inside the large tech companies to identify and punish or eliminate the Jesse Williams of the world from their platforms, why shouldn't they be held accountable for the consequences of the behavior enabled by the platform they developed?
One more quotes that stood out to me and made sense:
- "If Jesse Williams is responsible for the bad things his contractors did, why is Google not responsible for the bad things its advertisers did?"
To extend on that and not just limit this to Google - Uber recently got some bad publicity in LA. One incident where someone was charged several hundred dollars for what amounted to a cab ride home to from a bar and another where an uber rider left their cell phone in the car. Then the driver held the phone ransom for several hundred dollars and still never returned it. In the one case Uber suspended the drivers account and was trying to help the phone owner.
The point I am trying to make by bringing up Uber, who is not an advertising company, is as follows. Technology extends and scales human ability. But the onus is still on people to use technology morally, ethically & responsibly. The double edge on technology's sword is that not all people make choices with morals or ethics in mind. So, is a technology provider responsible for self policing their platform? Idk but reading the Atlantic article sway my opinion in the direction of, If the technology provider won't or "can't" be responsible then they open the doors for regulation without any sympathy from me.
I think they substantially underplayed how much the large tech companies are doing to prevent scam ads.
The evidence I have to back up that point is the case of "google charged the advertiser more" for it being somehow lower quality. That appears to me to be a very biased interpretation of how Adsense charges to maximize ecpm. Googles algorithms know that click through rates are low so they increase the price, the algo doesn't know why the click through rates are low.
The article also spent about zero time discussing how they fight spam and only said the companies say "we remove bad ads as fast as we can."
Judges throw out cases like the woman mentioned who got scammed because the preponderance of evidence is in favor of the company acting with good faith, not because they have a vested interest in perpetuating large internet company profits.
Further, the article plays fast and loose with the distinction between "our network is enormous, we do everything we can, but can't feasibly prevent every single case of spam" and "we don't do anything about spam."
By jumping between "every single case" and "anything" the author paints a complacent picture out of behavior that is anything but.
If that article left you newly strongly supporting internet regulation, I think you got scammed by the author.
> To a certain extent this behavior is nothing new. The 12 CD's for a penny scams I fell pray to as a child come to mind.
I'm not sure that I'd call that a scam. Myself and several of my friends were legitimate customers and never had any issues.
If it were a scam, though, it certainly worked both ways. I worked for Columbia House as a teenager ("data entry"), entering in all those applications that people sent in. We received an absurd number of obviously bullshit applications (e.g.: "Mickey Mouse", "Donald Duck", etc.) -- sometimes one after another, all with the same address and handwriting -- but were told to enter them in anyways.
Perhaps scam is the wrong word? Like the online affiliate model, there was quite a bit of fine print that I did not read. Notably the part (I'm paraphrasing here) where I get charged and continue to get charged if certain conditions are not met. As a 10 year old perhaps scam is the wrong word. But, to me, it feels very similar to the affiliate model of advertising online today.
One thing I don't see getting much attention here is the section on regulation and the lack of interest by tech companies who provide the platforms for people like this to exploit on.
Quoting part of the article, "... the tech companies that carry those ads tend to throw up their hands an declaim that the web is so huge that no one could hope to monitor it all."
This section of the article, where Edelman is quoted several times, stood out to me. It made me a little more sympathetic to regulation. In that, if there is no incentive inside the large tech companies to identify and punish or eliminate the Jesse Williams of the world from their platforms, why shouldn't they be held accountable for the consequences of the behavior enabled by the platform they developed?
One more quotes that stood out to me and made sense:
- "If Jesse Williams is responsible for the bad things his contractors did, why is Google not responsible for the bad things its advertisers did?"
To extend on that and not just limit this to Google - Uber recently got some bad publicity in LA. One incident where someone was charged several hundred dollars for what amounted to a cab ride home to from a bar and another where an uber rider left their cell phone in the car. Then the driver held the phone ransom for several hundred dollars and still never returned it. In the one case Uber suspended the drivers account and was trying to help the phone owner.
The point I am trying to make by bringing up Uber, who is not an advertising company, is as follows. Technology extends and scales human ability. But the onus is still on people to use technology morally, ethically & responsibly. The double edge on technology's sword is that not all people make choices with morals or ethics in mind. So, is a technology provider responsible for self policing their platform? Idk but reading the Atlantic article sway my opinion in the direction of, If the technology provider won't or "can't" be responsible then they open the doors for regulation without any sympathy from me.