Oops! All oligopoly

Normally when I go on about the attribution cartel I try to focus on theprivacy problem, because even though the anticompetitive side is important, some antitrust regulator somewhere will pick up on it eventually. And this is not a situation where antitrust and privacy are in tension. As Robin Berjon wrote,Competition & Privacy: It’s Both Or Nothing.

Sometimes, though, I’m just all, damn, dude, you said that part out loud? The Big Tech companies havecorporate training for talking about doing crimes, but it looks like Mozilla doesn’t have their ownStringer Bell, and ends up taking more “notes on a criminal fuckin’ conspiracy” than the other cartel members would probably like.

In an interview with Martin Thomson from Mozilla about the W3C Attribution API, Alan Chapell asks,

Critics have indicated that the privacy-budget mechanism favors large platforms whereby a single mistaken query can lock a small advertiser out, a constraint only a dominant firm could enforce. Does the design assume a power imbalance between platform and advertiser, and if so, does it entrench one?

And the answer is one that I’m going to archive just in case.

I want to acknowledge that this is one of the hard parts. Large platforms have more data to use, so they are able to slice that data in more ways than the little guys. With noise, you can’t slice what you get into thousands of pieces unless you have many thousands of people involved. Or, more likely millions. Small players need to be more careful and make fewer queries. And a mistake will wipe out more of their potential learnings as a result.

On top of that, big players will be better able to develop the discipline necessary to get more out of the system. More people, more resources, all that.

We spent a lot of time thinking about this problem. But we concluded that this was one area where attempting to levy a technical control was unwise. Competition law — as ineffective as it has been in stemming the rise of monopoly power in this market, and others — has a better suite of tools available than we do.

Right now, the best I can say is that there are no structural advantages provided to large players, other than what they obtain naturally. I understand that this might be disappointing, but it’s the pragmatic outcome in this case.

Let me check my notes here. Nope, not one of the members of the attribution cartel is Mother Nature. The “obtain naturally” has nothing to do with nature as we know it—it’s a reward to scale that results from the design of the attribution tracking system.

Oligopoly is hard-coded in—as a result of decisions made by and for the oligopoly companies. And of course it’s “pragmatic” for those who already dominate the online advertising market to design a system to keep dominating it.

When not to use the feedback sandwich

How did things get so far? Part of it has to do with the way that people responded all professionally to Google’s“Privacy Sandbox”.

The “feedback sandwich” (say something nice, make your critical point, say something else nice) is appropriate for many business contexts, but not that one. An intern who puts their private key in a script needs to be handled differently from a transnational corporation doing a multi-year plan to extend its market dominance. But every “Privacy Sandbox” op-ed was basically in the following format:

• Super stoked that Google is exercising such great leadership in privacy. All hail Google’s wisdom!

• Maybe Google is doing some tiny little crime that they could maybe think about doing a little less, or if not that’s fine too

• We look forward to doing free QA work for Google to test every morsel of code that drops down to us from on high.

(Yes, I wrote some stuff that ended up getting squeezed into this format, and no I don’t have the pre-edit versions, they’re in document history at a former employer.)

That whole saga set a bad example. Sometimes an “open source project” is a bona fide open source project, sometimes it’s the form of an open source project on top of a scheme with existing goals that are incompatible with the public interest.Think before you click.

Bonus links

Tech billionaires are shielding their children from the products that made them rich by Marco Quiroz-Gutierrez. (This is not just billionaires. Also applies to regular programmers, data scientists, and managers.)

Do Smart Glasses Have a Surveillance Problem? by Amy O’Brien. (Good example of social fragmentation I guess—I don’t know any group or space where Meta glasses are considered appropriate.)