It’s been dispiriting but unsurprising to see American commentators weigh in on the EU’s Digital Markets Act. I really wish they’d read Baldur’s excellent explainer first.

John has been doing his predicatable “leave Britney alone!” schtick with regards to Apple (and in this case, Google and Facebook too). Ian Betteridge does an excellent job of setting him straight:

A lot of commentators seem to have the same issue as John: that it’s weird that a governmental body can or should define how products should be designed.

But governments mandate how products are designed all the time, and not just in the EU. Take another market which is pretty big: cars. All cars have to feature safety equipment, which varies from region to region but will broadly include everything from seatbelts to crumple zones. Cars have rules for emissions, for fuel efficiency, all of which are designing how a car should work.

But there’s one assumption in John’s post that Ian didn’t push back on. John said:

It’s certainly possible that Meta can devise ways to serve non-personalized contextual ads that generate sufficient revenue per user.

That comes with a footnote:

One obvious solution would be to show more ads — a lot more ads — to make up for the difference in revenue. So if contextual ads generate, say, one-tenth the revenue of targeted ads, Meta could show 10 times as many ads to users who opt out of targeting. I don’t think 10× is an outlandish multiplier there — given how remarkably profitable Meta’s advertising business is, it might even need to be higher than that.

It’s almost like an article of faith that behavioural advertising is more effective than contextual advertising. But there’s no data to support this. Quite the opposite. I wrote about this four years ago.

Once again, I urge you to read the excellent analysis by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn.

There’s also Tim Hwang’s book, Subprime Attention Crisis:

From the unreliability of advertising numbers and the unregulated automation of advertising bidding wars, to the simple fact that online ads mostly fail to work, Hwang demonstrates that while consumers’ attention has never been more prized, the true value of that attention itself—much like subprime mortgages—is wildly misrepresented.

More recently Dave Karpf said what we’re all thinking:

The thing I want to stress about microtargeted ads is that the current version is perpetually trash, and we’re always just a few years away from the bugs getting worked out.

The EFF are calling for a ban. Should that happen, the sky would not fall. Contrary to what John thinks, revenue would not plummet. Contextual advertising works just fine …without the need for invasive surveillance and tracking.

Like I said:

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for users. The advertisements are irrelevant most of the time, and on the few occasions where the advertising hits the mark, it just feels creepy.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is bad for advertisers. They spend their hard-earned money on invasive ad tech that results in no more sales or brand recognition than if they had relied on good ol’ contextual advertising.

Tracker-driven behavioural advertising is very bad for the web. Megabytes of third-party JavaScript are injected at exactly the wrong moment to make for the worst possible performance. And if that doesn’t ruin the user experience enough, there are still invasive overlays and consent forms to click through (which, ironically, gets people mad at the legislation—like GDPR—instead of the underlying reason for these annoying overlays: unnecessary surveillance and tracking by the site you’re visiting).