The line you quote is present tense, not future tense.
In fact, you even agree, advertising has been made the only driver, in present and past tenses. This is correct. It is.
I think we can all agree, none of us want it to be like this.
The line you quote is not - and nothing else in the piece I see - a statement that Mozilla is advocating for advertising being the only driver in future. They're saying "society has chosen this model, we can't ignore it, so here's our approach on making it better".
Does anything in the piece you consider "compromised", - because? What? It's compromised for accurately stating present reality? Albeit a reality we don't particularly enjoy? How is that compromised, exactly? - obstruct or block other economic drivers from becoming dominant? Does it prevent crowd funding, patronage, subscriptions or any other economic model you can think of?
Sure, effort spent on making adtech less crappy means that effort is not being spent on actively promoting some other driver, so I can see lost opportunity costs here, but you haven't actually named an alternate economic model they should invest in.
> but you haven't actually named an alternate economic model they should invest in
It is their job to find alternate models, their glory and ongoing relevance if they do. Otherwise somebody else will do it sooner or later (the status-quo is untenable) but it would imply needless waste and a sad requiem for an organization that has been loved by many for a long time.
As they continue seeking "...a balance between commercial profit and public benefit" my 2 cents contribution is to (re)state the obvious: the adtech billions are only a tiny part of the commercial world, let alone the public interest at large.
Even if ads must be improved for some reason, I don't see why Mozilla can come up with a solution that is only marginally better than what Google and Facebook have proposed the same group as Mozilla (PATCG). And PPA was jointly developed with Facebook, a company that has a monopoly on advertisements on its own platform.
Basically all the people that have the revealed preference that they’ll however grudgingly pay with their attention than tossing down cash for most content.
These people do exist, but there's also the strong friction against filling out all your personal information (including credit card info) into every or entertainment site you thought interesting and then agree to some term with auto-renewal, etc. etc. Like maybe it just had the one good article/video/recipe or whatever. This is really an unworkable solution. For a pay-per-use internet sites to work, the payment has to be cheap, easy, trustworthy, and fast. This does not yet exist.
Micropayments have been tried through third party networks but they’ve never worked. Mental transaction costs is one explanation. People want “free” is probably the other.
Saying "people want free" strikes me as a warped view of the dynamic. It always seems presumptuous to me to think that people would be willing to pay to read what you have to say (or watch your video, etc.) merely because you said it. Most authors online aren't Socrates. Ads on the web are mostly on sites centered around idle distractions/entertainment. People pay exactly what that sort of "content" is worth: nothing.
People who want it to be like this are those who make money from it being like this.
It's the same for every other unliked aspect of life. Poverty, war, famine - they all exist because that condition makes some other group of people richer than they otherwise would be.
I am aware some parts of the World consider this observation to be a statement of socialist or communist support. It isn't meant to be.
Advertising is no different. There's a lot of money in the adtech business, and it drives and is driven by a large consumer economy. Most of the people working in it hate being advertised to (being "victims"), but are happy to make money from it (being "perpetrators"). Most of us don't get to make money from advertising, so are more likely to see it for the problems it imposes on us.
Morally there are huge differences, but logically you can see parallels in other disliked industries: arms dealing, modern slavery, enterprise IT sales...
The difference is that we are not talking about advertising as a sandboxed economic activity, but digital advertising on a common internet platform that is evolving into the only platform for practically everything that happens. Old style phone, radio, print communications are dissapearing in real time, everything is routed digitally over the internet.
Adtech with its "move fast and break things" morality conquered the internet hill, but it cannot defend that hill for much longer. Integrating vital functionalities for the digital economy (identity, payments, exchange of sensitive data etc.) cannot all be driven and controlled by adtech interests and designs. The dog is much, much bigger than the tail.
If Mozilla cannot help precipitate the new normal it should at least make sure it has ongoing relevance when the inevitable happens.
So this is a big problem then. Potentially insurmountable. There are in fact people then that want a privacy-invading ad-soaked shit internet and profit wildly from it. These people have outsized power and every incremental win leads to more power that results in more wins in a positive feedback loop.
Power comes from the people and can be taken away by the people. Modern surveillance and control technology will make this harder but ultimately the possibility revolution is always there.
> People who want it to be like this are those who make money from it being like this.
There's no reason why this is true. Advertising means you look at stuff in exchange for a service you don't pay for, and removes friction in visiting sites. Lots of people want that. How many would choose a world where you pay for every website you look at, other than payments processors charging transaction fees?
> Poverty, war, famine - they all exist because that condition makes some other group of people richer than they otherwise would be.
Capitalism is the thing that's lifted more and more of the world out of poverty, so I don't see this being the case. People got wealthy by making and selling stuff other people need and want. That's fine. The key to lifting people out of poverty instead of starving millions of people to death in the name of equality is: inequality isn't important; the base level of poverty being raised is.
> Advertising means you look at stuff in exchange for a service you don't pay for, and removes friction in visiting sites. Lots of people want that.
Except the "free" here is a lie because the advertisers pay for you and they are only going to do that when they can (on average) get their money back and more. There is no free lunch, just a lunch paid with the money you were robbed.
In fact, you even agree, advertising has been made the only driver, in present and past tenses. This is correct. It is.
I think we can all agree, none of us want it to be like this.
The line you quote is not - and nothing else in the piece I see - a statement that Mozilla is advocating for advertising being the only driver in future. They're saying "society has chosen this model, we can't ignore it, so here's our approach on making it better".
Does anything in the piece you consider "compromised", - because? What? It's compromised for accurately stating present reality? Albeit a reality we don't particularly enjoy? How is that compromised, exactly? - obstruct or block other economic drivers from becoming dominant? Does it prevent crowd funding, patronage, subscriptions or any other economic model you can think of?
Sure, effort spent on making adtech less crappy means that effort is not being spent on actively promoting some other driver, so I can see lost opportunity costs here, but you haven't actually named an alternate economic model they should invest in.