Upon 2020

Apparently, 1 billion Facebook “Like” buttons went up all over the web within the week.

Technically, this means, 1 billion web pages now include a piece of JavaScript from Facebook. That piece of Javascript is aware of the user’s identity (and preferences, and social network, …).

This enables Facebook to push out 1 billion advertisements to all over the web at the push of a button. These ads will be 100% targeted to the user, because they can be driven by all the personal information Facebook has about their users. They will almost certainly be better than Google’s because they are more aware of the user, and most crucially, can be social: e.g. “Your friend Joe is looking at SUVs today, would you like to assist him?” and stuff like that, just as with the “Like” button.

There is nothing anybody has to do, just Facebook needs to turn the knob on their end. Of course, they may decide not to overload the “Like” button, in which case it would be less automatic, but the exact same architecture can be used for ads, and now tens of thousands of sites know how to include them because they learned how from including the Like button.

Regardless which, if I were Google whose revenue is 90%+ advertising, I’d be really uncomfortable. How would you compete if you were them?

It is fashionable for corporations to declare their firm intentions to make the world a better place. If only one’s competitors wouldn’t embark on bad practices, then one would not have to copy them, or so the disclaimer usually goes.

Google’s threatened move out of China disrupts this excuse. You can bet that there are heated arguments right now in the strategy rooms of its Western competitors in China (Microsoft, Yahoo for search advertising according to this article) whether they should follow suit or shut up, kowtow and take the market share that’s up for grabs. Will men or mice emerge?

This could well turn out to be a watershed event for how the internet will look in 2020. If nobody follows Google’s bold move and nothing much happens, there is a good chance that more and more content filtering will be added to the internet, in China and otherwise. That’s the trajectory we are all on, unfortunately. (e.g. see this Wikipedia map on censorship) There will be workarounds, and hacks, to get at content anyway, just like in China today, and counter-hacks, and counter-counter-hacks, and so forth, but the net result is that content flows less freely.

On the other hand, if say, Yahoo declared their solidarity with Google today and threatened the same thing, it might well start an avalanche of Western firms saying, like Google, “enough is enough”. Imagine you have to defend, to your (mostly Western) users, that while the big guys are doing what your users think is the morally right stance, you are not. Not a great way of gaining users who love you. Yes, it would hurt to leave China; but it would also hurt to stay and lose Western customers instead.

In the best case, it would substantially slow and perhaps stop more censorship in the world outside of China for some time.

This is the kind of event that might have major ramifications for technology and society for years to come, which is why I’m putting it on this blog about technology in 2020.