10 Apr 2026 Search

(point of order: this site is now provisionally compliant with IEEE 7012: MyTerms. See the end of this blog post for details.)

Previously: Suspicion and slop in the rugpull economy. I checked the Costco site and compared prices:

Both 90 oz. bottles. (11.59-9.99)/9.99 = 16% price premium for the big-time brand.

Back in 2012, Consumer Reports compared big brands to store brands and found an average of 25% in savings. which means that the big brands had an average 33% price premium then.

The peak surveillance advertising years have been terrible for the big, heavily advertised brands. Meanwhile we have seen growth in A-list store brands—Costco seems to be disciplined about not releasing a Kirkland contender unless they can do it at a comparable quality level to the leading brand in the category.

Maybe

  • other signals of quality (online reviews?) are relatively stronger compared to brand advertising?

  • investments in surveillance advertising have displaced R&D, resulting in less differentiated brands on average?

P&G did not come in to the surveillance advertising era with a data or IT disadvantage, but surveillance advertising has not been good to them. So now, what’s the plan here? If it’s personalized/surveillance pricing that’s not going to work any better imho.

Myterms support (in progress)

This site now has a .well-known/myterms.json file that includes the effective date, along with a copy of the existing site ToS. I’ll update it to add all the other MyTerms agreements that I’m willing to enter into with a user. FIXME: download and add MyTerms agreements

From the user POV all you should have to do is save a copy of that JSON file: .well-known/myterms.json. This is a manual process for now, but a browser extension should be able to automate it.

There is a link tag in the head on this page to let you know the JSON file is there:

<link href="https://blog.zgp.org/.well-known/myterms.json"
      rel="terms-of-service"
      type="application/json">

see HTML attribute: rel for info on terms-of-service.

Right now this extremely basic MyTerms setup doesn’t displace “consent management” overhead for those who feel they need it (but most sites can get by without it, as the GitHub Blog pointed out a while ago.)

Add a browser extension to check and save MyTerms files and you should be able to get rid of “consent” dialogs too. But there’s still some record-keeping hassle from the site side.

So eventually a site—or a service provider— is going to have to extend the MyTerms JSON to include a URL that a user can POST to, with a record of the contract they accepted, or state that they they rejected all possible contracts available at the site, and request that the site should support a different contract. That would make record-keeping practical for the site, can scale up to more users.

Here’s the code:

If you want to accept my site ToS you should be able to grab the file and save it. (First person to do this could have a claim to the golden spike of MyTerms.)

More: next steps on tinyMyTerms