Winners don’t click search ads

The trademark policy problem

If you remember the old Acceptable Ads idea, the search ads used to be an example of online ads trying to do the right thing, and should go un-blocked. Now, blocking the search ads is essential, even if you block no other ads. (More: Search malvertising protection using enterprise policies) What the hell happened? Investors did. Google and Meta form a duopoly that has squeezed other companies out of the online advertising business, but the market expects them to keep growing at double-digit rates. Transformative innovation is priced in to Google’s stock price—but since they’re not delivering the next Internet or the next smartphone, they need to keep filling in the gaps with crime. Google management is like a losing gambler stealing larger and larger amounts of money from work. When the next big bet pays off they’ll be able to put it all back, right?

Google has made a series of changes to the Trademark Policy to make it easier and easier for one advertiser to copy another’s trademarks without getting caught. The owner of the infringed marks now has to identify and report the infringement. But, because Google uses machine learning to match the infringing ads with likely fraud and malware victims, the trademark owner isn’t likely to see them. And, of course, even if the one ad does get removed from the system, or one ad account gets kicked off, the malware and scam operators have more accounts ready to go. And all those extra malware and scam ad accounts are bidding up the price of Google ads for every other advertiser, so Number Go Up what if Ed Zitron is an optimist? and Google management needs to keep playing for another quarter.

Email spammers in the 1990s had a party line on spam filtering: it was just a priority for radical email administrators, who were over-blocking exciting offers that regular people would be happy to get. But that’s not what happened. Normal people’s positions on spam ended up roughly tracking the early adopter preferences. Today that’s roughly what’s happening with ad blocking. People don’t know the details, but they’re starting to recognize a dirty business when they see it. More: The traffic and revenue crisis for news is a symptom of Big Tech’s economy-wide trust collapse – RJI

(source of the title for this post: Winners Don’t Use Drugs)

Related

but I want to turn people into dinosaurs Meta’s advertising system is also designed to introduce extra, fraudulent bidders into the internal auction, for similar reasons.

how to break up Google This kind of thing would not be so much of an issue if the search market were more competitive. IT departments would be able to configure the search engine for employee use based in part on security issues like this. Legit b2b search advertisers could still get their ads seen, instead of getting blocked along with the fraud.

Return of the power user Advanced PC users used to have a better experience because they could customize early microcomputers that were poorly set up by default and get them to work right. Then the mainstream mass-market computers entered the Windows XP/Mac OS X era, when the hardware was easier to set up correctly and the software was more stable, better designed, and updated automatically—so the upside of learning to dink with your computer was lower. Now, the mainstream computers are designed to surveil and upsell users to other products and services, so dinking with your computer can make it a lot better again. (Another good recent example: New Windows 11 trick lets you bypass Microsoft Account requirement)

time to sharpen your pencils, people The fraud issue might be another good, politically neutral way to justify moving ad budgets away from surveillance oligarchs and toward legit content.

Bonus links

Bot farms invade social media to hijack popular sentiment by Eric Schwartzman. In a world where all information is now suspect and decisions are based on sentiment, bot farm amplification has democratized market manipulation. But stock trading is only one application. Anyone can use bot farms to influence how we invest, make purchasing decisions, or vote. (icymi: The majority of traffic from Elon Musk’s X may have been fake during the Super Bowl, report suggests by Matt Binder)

How to Prepare (Not Prep) for Uncertain Times… and Build a Better World in the Process by Susan Kaye Quinn. Look around, see what’s already happening in your community: generally a really good first option before assuming you have to do everything yourself or start something new.

Bringing Pollinators Back to Bay Farm Island: A Community Effort by Kristen Smeal and Mike Nettles. (open for volunteers)

Resistance from the tech sector by Drew De Vault The fact of the matter is that the tech sector is extraordinarily important in enabling and facilitating the destructive tide of contemporary fascism’s ascent to power….It’s clear that the regime will be digital. The through line is tech – and the tech sector depends on tech workers. That’s us. This puts us in a position to act, and compels us to act.

Don’t Forget The Forgotten Tech User by Ernie Smith. Fact is, there are a lot of people like this out there, who don’t necessarily want to be forced to buy the latest and greatest thing….

It’s Safer in the Front: Taking the Offensive against Tyranny Faced with intensifying repression and state violence, there is an understandable inclination to seek safety by avoiding confrontation. But this is not always the most effective strategy.

Law professors side with authors battling Meta in AI copyright case by Kyle Wiggers. The brief, filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, San Francisco Division, calls Meta’s fair use defense a breathtaking request for greater legal privileges than courts have ever granted human authors.

The Shocking Far-Right Agenda Behind the Facial Recognition Tech Used by ICE and the FBI by Luke O’Brien. This story, based on interviews with insiders and thousands of newly obtained emails, texts, and other records, including internal ICE communications, provides the fullest account to date of the extent of the company’s far-right origins and of the implementation of its facial recognition technology within the federal government’s immigration enforcement apparatus.

Why Are All the Smart People So Bad at History? by Joan Westenberg. This is a subculture that praises nuance and complexity in physics and economics but laps up the most simplistic historical narratives imaginable. (fwiw, it’s the same in advertising. People who can learn hella math don’t bother to learn the human factors. Perplexity CEO says its browser will track everything users do online to sell ‘hyper personalized’ ads Srinivas believes that Perplexity’s browser users will be fine with such tracking because the ads should be more relevant to them. There’s already a hyper-personalized medium, it’s called cold calls. And people hang up on those.)

Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces again last year — and the gap is growing by Alison F. Takemura. According to data from the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute released last week, Americans bought 21 percent more heat pumps in 2023 than the next-most popular heating appliance, fossil gas furnaces. That’s the biggest lead heat pumps have opened up over conventional furnaces in the two decades of data available from the trade group.

The Mismeasure of Man by Mandy Brown. As Gould capably shows, every effort to quantify intelligence has been beset by racist tautologies, errors of logic, mathematical mistakes, and repeated instances of fraud. We presume that intelligence is quantifiable but more than a century of efforts to adequately quantify it have failed. (icymi: IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle by Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

a promise, a threat, and a proportional response (Why declaring yourself a Nazi is different from declaring yourself as a member of other movements or factions.)