Controlled demolition

Wired has an short write-up of one of the books that i have on my reading list: Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang. The books central thesis is that targeted behavioural advertising ~is a scam~ does not really work any better than many other forms of advertising and as a result the whole ad-tech market has become a bubble akin to the housing bubble that lead to the last financial crisis:

So if Hwang is right that digital advertising is a bubble, then the pop would have to come from advertisers abandoning the platforms en masse, leading to a loss of investor confidence and a panicked stock sell-off. After months of watching Google and Facebook stock prices soar, even amid a pandemic-induced economic downturn and a high-profile Facebook advertiser boycott, it’s hard to imagine such a thing. But then, that’s probably what they said about tulips.

This is not something to be cheered. However much targeted advertising may have skewed the internet—prioritizing attention-grabbiness over quality, as Hwang suggests—that doesn’t mean we ought to let the system collapse on its own. We might hope instead for what Hwang calls a “controlled demolition” of the business model, in which it unravels gradually enough for us to manage the consequences.

How might that work? Hwang proposes a publicity campaign by researchers, activists, and whistleblowers that exposes the sickness of the online ad market, followed by regulations to enforce transparency. Digital advertisers would have to make public, standardized statements to help buyers evaluate their wares. The goal would be to narrow the dangerous disconnect between perceived and actual value.

I like the idea of a “controlled demolition” but it feels to me that we are already deep into the publicity campaign (at least in Europe, see here for an example that some of my colleagues at IVIR are involved in) and that the focus really needs to be on regulation. In this context it will be key to see if the upcoming Digital Services Act will include regulatory interventions of the type that Hwang envisages. For me that is one of the most interesting questions about the DSA (instead of endlessly re-hasing discussions about liability and responsibility).