It's a hard question, and I won't pretend that I have the precise answer. But my hunch is that we're best served by making demands on regulators and legislators to set and enforce better rules and protections.
Making demands directly on the tech companies has limited efficacy and duration.
Collectively organizing user-boycotts works even less well -- you might get a brief victory, but the companies will change their own rules before they feel truly threatened.
If we want a better internet, I think we have to convince legislators and regulators to stop treating digital technology as "innovation happening so fast that you can't regulate it." That's an outdated belief that has caused a lot of trouble, but still rears its ugly head. And we also need the government to start enforcing antitrust the way it did in the 20th century. (Lina Khan and her team are on the right trajectory here, but they'll need time and support.)
All of that will still be hard, since the courts are broken and the legislature is broken and the administrative state was hollowed out and takes time to rebuild.
I think one way is obvious: pay for things. Cash money.
Huge distortions in products are driven by people's unwillingness to pay small sums of money. Enormous effort is invested in ads; products are warped by advertising. eg on youtube, the reason they care so much about watch time is that ad revenues are linear in watch time. This drives their recommendation system in really negative ways.
And for all of this: FB arpu in the US and Canada, 2021 figures: $60.57. As recently as 2019, $40; 2017, $27 [1]. You can do back-of-the-envelope stuff that I'm too lazy to do right now for youtube based on semi-disclosed revshares for youtube content producers, but it's (I think) well lower.
Being willing to pay for things fundamentally changes the incentives driving revenues and hence product decisions.
It's a hard question, and I won't pretend that I have the precise answer. But my hunch is that we're best served by making demands on regulators and legislators to set and enforce better rules and protections.
Making demands directly on the tech companies has limited efficacy and duration.
Collectively organizing user-boycotts works even less well -- you might get a brief victory, but the companies will change their own rules before they feel truly threatened.
If we want a better internet, I think we have to convince legislators and regulators to stop treating digital technology as "innovation happening so fast that you can't regulate it." That's an outdated belief that has caused a lot of trouble, but still rears its ugly head. And we also need the government to start enforcing antitrust the way it did in the 20th century. (Lina Khan and her team are on the right trajectory here, but they'll need time and support.)
All of that will still be hard, since the courts are broken and the legislature is broken and the administrative state was hollowed out and takes time to rebuild.
But I think that's the basic direction, at least.
I think one way is obvious: pay for things. Cash money.
Huge distortions in products are driven by people's unwillingness to pay small sums of money. Enormous effort is invested in ads; products are warped by advertising. eg on youtube, the reason they care so much about watch time is that ad revenues are linear in watch time. This drives their recommendation system in really negative ways.
And for all of this: FB arpu in the US and Canada, 2021 figures: $60.57. As recently as 2019, $40; 2017, $27 [1]. You can do back-of-the-envelope stuff that I'm too lazy to do right now for youtube based on semi-disclosed revshares for youtube content producers, but it's (I think) well lower.
Being willing to pay for things fundamentally changes the incentives driving revenues and hence product decisions.
[1] https://fourweekmba.com/facebook-arpu